Last-Minute Breakfasts (sca)
OK, last minute is a bit of an exaggeration. I had five days.
When I got home from Coronation, I found an email from Baroness Bianca waiting for me. The original breakfast-crat had had surgery, and they needed someone to make breakfast on Saturday (for about 150 people) and Sunday (for about 75 people) at Red Tower the next weekend. Could I do it?
How could I say no? She's a friend, she needed help, and it was an excuse to cook. My husband was very understanding and encouraging, too.
I didn't have a lot of time -- normally a week would be enough for me to knock out an an entire feast's worth of planning, but I also had two classes to teach and a meeting to attend. As luck would also have it, I came down with a cold during the week, so I was mentally out of it for a couple of days.
Anyway, because of those factors, I decided to go with something really simple: pancake sandwiches for Saturday, and muffins and bacon on Sunday.
We purchased pre-cooked sausage patties, so they only needed reheating. Because it would have taken for....e....ver.... to heat that much sausage on the griddle, we layered them in roasting pans, covered them with foil, and stuck them in a low-temperature oven while I made the pancakes. Doug has a gift with scrambling eggs, so I had him do that part. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of the quantity of eggs he prepared, but it was about 14 dozen.
Meanwhile, I prepared the oatmeal pancakes.
It was odd: when I made these at another SCA event a month or so earlier, people gobbled them up. They loved having everything in a sandwich they could carry around with them. This time, people weren't so sure. They didn't know what to make of sandwiches with pancakes instead of bread. Practically everyone ate the ingredients -- pancakes, sausage, eggs, and cheese -- but very few were willing to eat them as a sandwich, even when we didn't have butter and syrup available.
Sunday, we still had pancakes and sausage left. However, I made banana muffins and oatmeal-applesauce muffins anyway. But instead of opening the bacon, we used the leftover sausage. We also sliced up a watermelon we'd been given.
I saw one of the squires walking around with a handful of food, so I totally ripped off his idea -- a sausage and oatmeal-applesauce muffin sandwich is an excellent thing. Yay, Cisco!
I think there were three muffins left of the six or seven dozen I'd made, so I'd consider that a win.