Cheerful Frugality Cooks Breakfast

These are some great ideas. Thanks for the inspiration!

Love the ideas – breakfast is always the hardest meal for me to be creative with. Thanks for the inspiration!

I’m pretty good at breakfast – in the winter we do a lot of variations on oatmeal (steel cut! large flake with apples! and so on), poached eggs on toast, waffles, gingerbread pancakes with homemade applesaue – and in the summer, we do fruit smoothies, granola and yogurt parfaits and fruit salads.

Breakfast is our favorite meal of the day! Preparing the night before is my secret- taking a few minutes to prepare makes the morning go so much smoother, and there’s a happy mama smiling from her place at the table.
Baked oatmeal is always a hit, as well as homemade leftover waffles (from Saturday when I have time in the morning- I must try the blender waffles you freeze ahead!) stuffed into a toaster and smothered in jelly.
Thanks for the great tips and post, Meredith!

Recently I made what looked to me like one of those breakfast skillet things from Denny’s. I had some potatoes, kale, and Italian sausage that needed to be used. I cut open the sausage and removed the casing. I fried that up with some onions, cut up potato, red bell pepper, and the kale. I also added a scrambled egg. This was so delicious!

Great topic! My husband’s favorite breakfast is at Old Country Buffet. Not only is the food fairly good, there is a LOT of it. I think that is his main requirement for a good meal.

When we do this at home, I’ll make french toat, hashbrowns, scrambled eggs and either bacon or sausage.

I’m hungry already!

Trixie

I make French Toast Waffles for my kids and they love it! It helps get us out of a rut. Just take bread and dip into your egg mixture, just like you would for french toast. Then, put it in the waffle iron. Close and cook. When you pull it out it looks like waffle and tastes like french toast. Top with whatever you’d like. It’s fun for the kids to watch you make.

Using up leftover odds&sods from the fridge is a great way to prevent waste. We often have 2 or 3 slices of bacon left (cooked) from having breakfast for supper (which we do at least twice a month) That’s not enough for anyone to have a whole slice so I cook up a pan of grits, warm the crumbled bacon in my cast iron skillet and scramble 5 or 6 eggs with it. Then I layer grits (with butter, salt and pepper), eggs/bacon and a bit of shredded cheese in a bowl for each of us. A bit like Krystal’s breakfast bowls but without the biscuit. We prefer toast or a biscuit on the side (if we have bread at all) This is the only way my husband likes savory grits.

My hubby really like a restaurant breakfast because he can have 3 or 4 different breakfast meats. He likes a bit of sausage, bacon, ham and maybe even some sausage gravy, if he can get them all. I have never actually duplicated that particular meal for him at home. I really should try. He is all about variety. Thanks for getting me thinking about that

I worked at a small boat club, cooking friday and saturday supper, and a sunday brunch. Much of the leftovers from the suppers ended up on the brunch buffet.

We had an ‘make your own’ omelet station on which appeared lots of salad bar leftovers: peppers, cheese, mushroom, green onions, chopped tomatoes, bacon bits, salsa. . . people would come looking for other hoped for leftovers that I hadn’t thought of putting out. Almost any food you can think of, SOMEBODY would like to put in their egg! One club memer liked ’spaghetti omelet’. Egg mixture poured over warmed up spaghetti and tomato sauce. sounds icky to me, but I wasn’t feeding me!

Alot of other leftovers ended up in casseroles on the hot food line. This bothered me at first, as I want BREAKFAST when I go to brunch, but I finally realized that a lot of the club members wanted lunch. They’d come down for the weekend, were sleeping on their boat and had arisen as early as I to ‘batten down the hatches’ before returning home for the week. They’d had coffee and toast much earlier and were ready for something hearty and lunch-y. Casseroles allowed me to use up very small amounts that otherwise would have to be trashed because of not being ‘enough’ and because we only served those 3 meals each week.

Seafood leftovers went into a seafood pie with leftover or instant mashed potato as the topping. Other meats or poultry might go into similar dishes. Sometimes, there would be leftover frozen puff pastry from a dessert, and so the pies would have beautiful puffy tops instead.

Smaller amounts of leftover meats would go into ‘quiche’ type dishes–I kept frozen piecrusts on hand, but at home, one is easy enough. The same sort of ingredients might also be mixed with leftover rice and the egg mixture and baked.

I was in california, so corn tortillas, enchilada sauce, and a bit of meat and cheese became tortilla casserole.

A club member came to help one day. She’d done a lot of the cooking before the club was big enough for hired help. She taught me to make seafood lasagna: Lasagna noodles, white sauce, whatever cheese, and leftover seafood. (other lasagnas were not as popular, but this was beloved, I think she’d been sent in on purpose by people who missed it!) Sometimes, I’d make a seafood casserole with this idea, but using leftover pasta that hadn’t any tomatoe sauce on it.

We had a ‘toast your own’ station as well. At the end of the day, bread which had been sitting out was frozen, and used the next week for bread pudding/french toast casserole. Leftover doughnuts and danish might also be cut up and added. The surprise bits of fruit filling in the danish were yum in the pudding.

Leftover prime rib (OK, not a frugal leftover, but this was a club!) was cut in strips and served in gravy which was hyped up with a bit of wine from the bar. Perhaps also mushrooms, onions.

It’s been a while since that job, that’s all I can think of right now!

What awesome tips–I will have to post about my breakfasts soon–they are so loved by my honey:)

Julieann

I worked at Shoney’s for about 5 years or so when I was younger (course this was atleast 12 years ago) and they only served their breakfast bar on Saturdays and Sundays LOL!

My family’s favorite breakfasts are baked oatmeal, biscuits & gravy, and fresh fruit and yogurt. Thats about as fancy as it gets here. If I do a “big” breakfast with all the fixings I don’t serve it for breakfast, I make it for dinner. Our family are light eaters in the morning, though.

thanks for share.

I will to do it sometime