When there is work to be done on the Law Family Homestead (which is nearly constant of course) it is usually physically demanding at least to some extent. Being a male dominated household with fast metabolisms means that we spend a lot of time coming up with healthy, filling and high calorie meals to feed these guys. Also with Kit working as a timber cruiser we have found he is better able do his work when he has high calorie meals. But being out in the woods without refrigeration for a week at a time poses another challenge in creating those meals. Over the years we have managed to fine tune our meals to fit the above requirements.
As I haven't done a recipe for awhile, and I'm in the middle of preparing some of these make ahead meals in anticipation of another timber cruising season, I figured it would make an easy blog post.
I decided to do our breakfast pockets. These lend themselves easily to being made ahead of time but there is a bit of prep work. If you work with already prepared ingredients you could probably assemble them fairly quickly for a breakfast. We usually spend a day making up the ingredients, as we do everything from scratch, and another day assembling them. But we are talking large batches of everything here.
First, mix up your bread dough ahead of time and let it sit while you get the rest of your ingredients ready. This entails peeling, shredding and frying the hash browns. Then mixing up all the ingredients to make our own beef sausage, and frying it. And then frying up a batch of onions in homemade butter, and finally cracking and cooking our farm-fresh eggs until softly scrambled.
Once you have all your ingredients ready you can actually proceed with assembling and baking the pockets.
You may want to decide ahead of time how many calories you want to consume for breakfast. This allows you to custom make your pockets to fit your specific needs. For the crew I feed, and for Kit's cruising diet, we are shooting for a 2,000 calorie breakfast. Sounds like a lot, but when you're burning 5,000 to 6,000 calories per day and spend up to 12 hours of your day out hiking brushy mountainsides, calories are metabolized quickly. Other activities such as hewing out logs with an axe, shoeing horses, or even shoveling snow can burn 300 to 500 calories an hour. So figure out what you want the calorie content for the whole pocket to be, and then break that down for each ingredient.
Break off a piece of dough of the right calorie amount. We figured everything by weight and then used a kitchen scale to get it right. So if you want to copy our recipe you will need 5.45 ounces of dough. Take a rolling pin and roll it out thin, you don't want your pocket to be all bread and no filling.
Next we fill ours with beef sausage and farm fresh eggs. The eggs are 1.7 ounces and our homemade jersey beef sausage is 2.65 oz.
Then we add 2.3 ounces of hashbrowns.
We top it off with the sauteed onions and our own aged cheese. I forgot how much onions we used but it was negligible in adding anything to the calories anyway; the cheese was 1.85 ounces.
All these ingredients are placed on one half of the rolled out bread dough. That way when you are ready . . .
. . . you fold it over the top of everything and crimp the edges.
Place on cookie sheet and back at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until lightly browned on top.
Done to perfection, and ready for consumption.
Or in our case, I let them cool and then vacuum pack and freeze them. They are then, an easy, ready to reheat meal anytime I need a fast, filling breakfast, or for Kit to take with him in the woods. As near as we can tell, with our figures these run around 1,391 calories, when you add a 144 calorie banana and a pint of whole raw milk at 432 calories you now have a breakfast that is 1,967 calories and will keep you running until lunch time without feeling faint.