How to do a cooked breakfast with lots of elements for people who all want different things

[miss_s_b]

tl;dr: use the oven and lots of butter.

Your options for this breakfast are:

• sausages (meaty or veggie)
• mushrooms
• soft sliced onions
• hash browns
• black pudding
• fresh tomatoes (not tinned, though)
• baked beans
• bacon (or facon for vegetarians)
• fried bread
• toast
• fried eggs

This is how I do breakfast (we're just going to take the repeated handwashing as read, ok? But it's very important to wash your hands any time you have handled raw meat, or have done anything which might leave a residue on your hands, such as tossing sliced mushrooms in melted butter):

• T minus 45 mins before breakfast (assuming your oven takes 5 mins to preheat; adjust as necessary): Turn the oven on to 200^oc and make yourself a cup of tea while it preheats. You're going to need it.
• Make a list of who wants what items, and put it somewhere very visible in the kitchen - possibly blutacked to the wall if you don't have a cookbook stand you can put it on.
• Tot up how many of each item you need to cook - you may need a seperate list for this if you're doing breakfast for a lot of people. If you do need two lists, make sure they are both visible at all times.
• 40 mins to go before service: put the meaty sausages in a pyrex lasagne dish or similar and put them in the preheated oven.
• Get another pyrex lasagne dish, and melt a reasonable amount of butter in it in the microwave. Chop your mushrooms and toss them in the melted butter with salt and pepper.
• Do exactly the same for onions as you did for the mushrooms. You can do them in the same dish if you like, as long as you haven't got an onion-liking mushroomphobe or vice versa.
• Put your hash browns on a baking tray and season to taste - a few grinds of black pepper for me, but YMMV.
• Put your black pudding(s) on a baking tray.
• Put whole tomatoes on a baking tray too (you may at this point be grasping the vastness of my oven; many of these things can be put on shared baking trays if it helps. I often have tomatoes, hash browns and black pudding all on the same tray; you do need to bear in mind vegetarians with black pudding being on the tray with other things, though ;) )
• Speaking of vegetarians, if you have them, ignore the cooking instructions on the veggie sausages. Put them in yet another pyrex dish, slather them in melted butter, and add salt and pepper.
• 20 minutes to go: put the veggie sausages, whole tomatoes, hash browns, mushrooms, onions, and black pudding that you've prepped into the oven. Turn the meaty sausages while you've got the door open.
• Put the baked beans in a saucepan and put it on the smallest ring of the hob on the lowest heat. Adulterate the beans to taste. I like to add salt (low salt beans can FRO), fresh ground black pepper, Henderson's relish, garlic granules and oregano. From this point on, stir the beans occasionally whenever you have a hand free just to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan while they warm through.
• Make tea and coffee for those who have asked for it, and set the table for (or distribute cutlery to) the waiting hordes.
• Put the meaty bacon on yet another baking tray
• 10 minutes to go, put the meaty bacon in the oven.
• Get three large frying pans and set them warming reasonably slowly with some butter in them on your other three rings of your hob. You want a nice heavy cast iron one for the eggs, but nonstick will do for the fried bread and facon if you have to have nonstick (I hate non stick so bad)
• Set your plates out on the work surface, near your list of who-wants-what. It helps to have a different coloured plate for each person, IME.
• In frying pan #1, put the facon
• In frying pan #2, fry the bread
• In frying pan #3, fry the eggs
• Scream at the inevitable person who has smelled breakfast and come into the kitchen to make themselves coffee, and who didn't ask for it earlier, to FUCK OFF OUT OF YOUR KITCHEN TILL YOU'VE DISHED UP.
• Set the toast going.
• 2 minutes to go, start getting things out of the oven and distributing them among the plates. Meaty sausages first, veggie sausages last.
• Slap any toast you may have cooked on the relevant plates and butter it.
• Do the hob in the following order: baked beans, fried bread, facon, fried eggs.
• Scream that breakfast is up, and wait for people to collect all the plates except yours
• Eat your well-earned breakfast, and listen to the happy clanging of your arteries.

I am aware that some people prefer scrambled eggs rather than fried for breakfast; that's not really practical with this breakfast, what with everything else that's going on, but you can check out a scrambled egg recipe here (good set of comments on that post too).

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Andrew would cook bacon in the oven for breakfast when he still ate bread and would have bacon sandwiches. Now that he doesn't, he'd only eat bacon AND sausage AND eggs and I wish you could make eggs in the oven because I think that's the only way to stop him going to a café for breakfast every day... :)

[miss_s_b]

I hesitate to put this, but you could maybe get a small silicone pie pan and bake an egg in that?

[cosmolinguist]

Having to start things at different times is still an obstacle for him.

[norfolkian]

Remind me to come to yours for breakfast at some point. ;)

I would probably chuck the mushrooms in with the sausages so they absorbed all the sausage-y goodness. But the buttered ones sounds amazing too. Also, it has to be fried (or poached) eggs with a full English. And I am totally with you on the no-one entering the kitchen until I've finished cooking thing.

[miss_s_b]

I would not throw the mushrooms in with the sausages, because I love sausages and detest mushrooms. I can see why people who like both might do that though ;)

[missdiane]

You having breakfast or running a diner?

[miss_s_b]

Well, there's four adults and a daughter pretty much every morning for breakfast at our house, and we often have people stopping over at the weekend, so...

[moetushie]

Wow, I want to have breakfast at your house. That sounds fantastic and organized.

Personally, if I'm making breakfast for a lot of people and I absolutely can't avoid it, I always opt for a veggie-packed fritatta. I'm not big on meats at breakfast, but I can reheat kebabs or leftover meat for people who need extra protein.

If nothing else suits there's always toast. Or cereal.

[miss_s_b]

It is all just about timing, honestly.
I can't do cereal for my household cos I've got a lactose intolerant person, sadly.

[moetushie]

I know those feels -- some time in my twenties my stomach decided that milk just wasn't going to work. I've pretty much completely switched over to unsweetened almond milk, but that's not without its costs either.

[miss_s_b]

Lactose intolerant person is also nut-allergic.
I also have a nut allergic, gluten free vegetarian, and a bananananaphobic tomato hater.

[anisiriusmagus]

Sounds great, although I must take issue with the artery clanging. If anything in that breakfast is going to do that, it's the bread and the hash browns. Fat is your friend. I'm currently reading this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Fat-Surprise-butter-healthy/dp/192522810X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495029607&sr=1-1&keywords=the+big+fat+surprise which is just the latest in a long line of books I've been reading which attempt to work out why the heck everyone is obese and diabetic. Spoiler alert, it isn't the fat, it's the refined carbs and sugar. ;)

[miss_s_b]

Ha! You've been possessed by matgb ;)

I'm aware of that paradigm, and while cautiously accepting of it, am also aware of all the paradigms that have gone before which people have accepted as being 100% totally correct, so I'm going to just keep eating what I like ;)

[anisiriusmagus]

Eating what you like is the best course. The diet-heart hypothesis which was started by Ancel Keys in the 1950s was always just that, an hypothesis. Keys dogmatic belief that his theory was right has screwed the world over. He wouldn't even entertain the notion that other factors (sugar consumption, owning a TV, smoking) had an effect on heart disease. It's just really bad science, and the fact that Ani-nan had, and Daddy-Ani has a medical history of chronic avoidable health conditions such as high blood pressure, sleep apnoea, type 2 diabetes, angina etc etc etc, I'm keen to do all I can to avoid getting them too. :)