Breakfast Burritos, Or Yes, Another Food Post

If time allows, Adrian and I take a weekend afternoon and make a batch of burritos together.  If nature allows these are made with backyard eggs, but that isn't working either, is it? Purchasing Free-Range Organic Eggs obviously added to the overall cost of these breakfast portions, which I would still say cost less that whatever you're buying at McDonalds or Starbucks. They also taste much better in my opinion.

We did our bulk shopping and had a busy weekend schedule, so I volunteered to take one for the team and prep 30 Breakfast Burritos myself today.  It wasn't all bad - Adrian did the dishes when he got home! 

Always with the 'making a mess anyway' mentality, I additionally cooked up 2 packages of bacon for the freezer (to be added to chard and kale stir fries, perogies, baked beans, pea soup etc. over the winter months), and processed a batch of blender salsa to make use of the last of my succession of cilantro plantings, and a few of the more delicate-flavoured red shallots, now that our red onions are all gone.  Because I was on my own, I took the shortcuts of buying frozen hashbrowns instead of dicing my own potatoes, and I bought cheddar slices (not processed cheese) instead of shredding a block of aged cheddar, which we prefer - there's more flavour with less cheese.

 

These food prep and preservation days make me love this table even more.  30 pieces of aluminum foil.....

 

About 20 of our home-grown Alisa Craig onions....

Whole grain tortillas and the frozen hashbrowns with the least number of ingredients listed (why are there so many ingredients in frozen diced potatoes?)

 

A slice of cheese, a portion of black forest ham....

 

Carmelized onions, browned potatoes, and 36 eggs worth of scramble later....

 

And we have breakfast, from the freezer to the toaster, cooked through in 40 minutes - ideally timed for mornings when we manage to get out of bed for a 6 am workout.

 

After planting out multiplier onions and shallots to the garlic beds this weekend, and all this cooking, these are all the onions we have left from our harvest.

Not Your Average Tuna Casserole

This past week I made another set of casseroles for the freezer (and for the day's dinner).  While I call it a Tuna Casserole, it really only contains a nominal amount of tuna (a fifth of a can per portion).  The remainder of the casserole is a selection of vegetables, herbs, a bit of cheese, sauce and pasta.  I had a quick peek online, and actually saw a recipe which involved a box of Kraft Dinner, a can of tuna, a can of Cream of Mushroom Soup, and a bag of chips!

 

Much of the food we make here traces back to a start with a mirepoix of celery, onion and carrot, though often, as here, chard ribs, parsley, and celery leaf herb stands in for the celery (they grow wonderfully well here in the garden, even overwintering and allowing for a small, continual harvest as well as a real spring harvest - celery and celery root are a bit of a trial and go mushy once the weather gets chilly).

 

Add in some tuna, diced tomato, corn, peas, mushrooms, al dente pasta, and Alfredo sauce (or some type of cream sauce - traditionally a cream soup).  We bough the Alfredo sauce almost a year ago when it was on special -impulse buy!-  expecting to use it for a quick pasta dinner, and there it sat.  It worked just fine as a stand-it.

I mixed spices, parmesan, shredded cheddar, and buttered breadcrumbs together, and added them to the casserole to help bind things together and add flavour.

 

I topped the casseroles with a bit more of the breadcrumb mixture, and there you go, 32 portions of vegetable/tuna casserole!