Camp -- Independence Day Country Breakfast

As I said a few weeks ago, we cooked breakfast outdoors this morning. A used the barbecue grill as my cooktop and prepared scrambled eggs, cottage fried potatoes, buttermilk biscuits and country gravy for 165 campers. (The breakfast bar rounded the menu with apples, oranges, juice, milk, cereal and peanut butter and jelly.)

I lit 24-pounds of Kingsford charcoal at 6:40 this morning. The first thing I did was to sweat chopped onions in margarine for the cottage fried potatoes in a deep Dutch oven. I then used this oven to cook the gravy.

Six quarts of sausage gravy was prepared in a 14-inch deep Dutch oven. I used two 14-inch regular ovens to brown the potatoes. To save time, we use a pre-cooked diced red potato product from Sysco. Thirty pounds of potatoes were cooked in two batches. About four pounds of potatoes fit into each oven.

It took 18-dozen medium eggs to feed 165 campers. We scrambled the eggs in four batches in this wonderful skillet that comes with the camp. One of these days, I'm going to purchase one.

After the meal. We served breakfast from about 8:40 a.m. to 9:10 a.m. The eggs were transferred from the large skillet to a Dutch oven for service. We baked the biscuits in the kitchen to save time, but served them from a Dutch oven. The kids ate everything except for about 10 portions of the potatoes and eggs.