The Challenge of Feeding Teenagers

My house was always full of children. I only gave birth to three but when someone hollers Mom at Wal-Mart I just turn around. Sometimes I think I raised half the teenagers in the county.

I'm here to tell you, teenagers like to eat. Which is fine with me, because I like to cook. No one ever left my house hungry. Adult, child, it didn't matter. If you were there at mealtimes, you were fed.

At holidays I always had a least a dozen kids there calling me Mom. I'd put out on Facebook that I'm taking requests for dessert. I'd get more requests for dessert than I would food, with the exception of pigs in a blanket. That was always a popular request. There was chocolate pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie, New York style cheesecake, and the ever popular strawberry cake.

And holiday meals are easy because you always cook a lot of food and there's plenty to go around. If they got hungry later, they hit the leftovers. Half the time I was sending leftovers home because I had no room in the fridge for them.

My problem, however, arose when morning came to find I still had six or seven teenagers left over from the night before. Now, what do you suppose said teenagers were interested in upon waking up? You guessed it, breakfast.

Now, unless I had half a dozen boxes of cereal and 2 gallons of milk handy, that meant I had to cook. Since I never seemed to plan for those sleepover kids, I had to find a solution for breakfast for half a dozen or so teenagers.

Well, we raised chickens and pigs so the staple for breakfast in our house was eggs and ham . Do you know that if you put several teenagers together, no more than two like their eggs the same way? Little did I know. The one thing they all agreed on were omelets.

Now, omelets are pretty much a one at a time kind of thing. Making one omelet at a time is not only time consuming but, in my house, required a referee. This does not work with teenagers because one will try to steal the other's food while theirs is cooking. Animals....I was raising animals.

My solution to this was omelet in a bag.

Everyone gets three eggs and a heavy duty freezer bag. Everyone writes their name on said freezer bag. This is where the fun starts and the part that the kids liked the best.

They crack their eggs into their bags and scramble them. Sometimes gently, sometimes by hitting each other with the bags. They knew if they broke said bag, they were going without breakfast so they were relatively careful.

I would chop up a variety of things like onion, ham, tomato, bell pepper, et cetera.

Oh, and don't forget the cheese. There must be cheese. Everyone adds what they like to their bags and seals them up.

After everyone is done, all the bags go into a stock pot full of boiling water for 20 minutes.

This 20 minute period is when pillows and blankets are put away, kids get dressed, chickens and pigs get fed.

I would pull all the bags out of the pot and set them on a towel on the counter. Then it's as easy as cutting off the top of the bag with a pair of scissors and rolling a perfectly cooked omelet out onto the plate. All they had to do was grab a fork and enjoy their personalized omelet. Clean up consists of throwing away the plastic bags, pouring the water out of the pot.