Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Meal Time Short Cuts: Breakfast Sausage

Breakfast Sandwiches Ready To Go
     It doesn't matter if you stay home or if you work outside the home we are all very busy! Sometimes I have been gone most of the day and get home within an hour of dinner, sometimes I've had a sick kid and dinner was the last thing on my mind, and other times I was the sick one and my poor husband, mother, or sister was left to cook for my family. In all these instances my meal time short cuts have proven invaluable! Yes they do take some time upfront but the payoff is wonderful!
     Every weekend I pull about two pounds of sausage out of my freezer to defrost in the fridge overnight. (I cook two pounds because that is what will fit into my cast iron skillet at one time. If it was bigger I would cook more.) I put them on a plate with a lip so that if they create a mess I am not scrubbing my fridge the next day. The next morning I removed the sausage from the fridge, pat it into patties the size of a biscuit, cook (if you add water to the pan it prevents extra thick patties from burning on the outside before they are done in the middle), and place on a napkin or paper towel to absorb some of the grease. Sometimes I will brown an additional pound and freeze it for a future breakfast casserole, breakfast scramble, or a potato soup.
     At this point I will generally serve them as part of that day's breakfast and what is not eaten (most of them) become ready made meals. They can go into a storage bag or container in the fridge, be made into a breakfast sandwich and refrigerated/frozen (place in a sandwich bag and add all the bagged sandwiches to a large freezer bag, I recommend defrosting in the fridge overnight before re-heating), or frozen flat on a cookie sheet and placed into a freezer bag in the freezer. This allows me to hand my husband a quick breakfast sandwich on his way to work, have a breakfast protein I don't have to cook in the morning for my girls, and significantly cuts down on the amount of cereal we eat (we rarely eat cereal). It also makes all the mess at once and we all love not scrubbing pans first thing in the morning! What Meal Time Short Cuts do you use?
 
Sausage bagged and ready for the rest of the week.

1 comment:

  1. Love this idea.....ao simple, yet I hadn't considered it until now!

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