Easy Meal: oven-cooked Egg Foo Young for a crowd

Although I like cooking, I do not like cooking individually prepared servings for more than, hmm, two people (like pancakes, omelets, etc).  Standing over the stove while everybody else eats everything is not my idea of a fun time -- and since ours was a family of 6 until just the past few years when these kids started growing up and moving out -- I have a number of recipes and strategies to deal with cooking for larger numbers (like I make pancakes on a big griddle that can cook 8 at one time, and I do bacon in the oven on a cookie sheet with a rack on it so I can cook a whole package at one time).  I make frittatas instead of omelets.  Then I modified the frittata recipes to cook in the oven in a 9x13 pan.

Anyhoo, I decided to experiment with Egg Foo Young style recipes and see if I couldn't do Egg Foo Young in a 9x13 pan in the oven like the frittatas.

Score!  Easy, uses up a lot of miscellaneous bits hanging around in the fridge, cooks itself in the oven, veggies held up crunchy, tasted good hot or room temperature, and leftovers heated up well the next day.

We finished dinner before I thought to take a picture, but here is what was left, along with the side bowl of Egg Foo Young sauce.  It reheated perfectly for lunch the next day.

I chopped up some small onions from our CSA, some sweet peppers, chard greens and the stems from the chard from my garden (the chopped stems take the place of celery very nicely in recipes, and the leaves take the place of spinach or other greens), and added some sliced mushrooms.  I stir fried all of this very briefly in a sauté pan -- mostly to shrink up the chard, and put it all in a 9x13 baking dish (spray or spread a bit of oil in the pan so things don't stick).  You can use anything you have on hand, including some cooked meat.  Some bean sprouts would have been great, but I didn't have any.

Then I beat 12 eggs (I could have just used 6-8 eggs, but they are from my own chickens and are "medium" in size and I had about 3 dozen in the fridge at the time and really wanted to use some up and free up some space!), along with 1/4 cup of milk (could have used water).  I poured the egg on top of the veggies in the pan and put it all in a preheated 375 oven to cook for about 20 minutes.  It came out great, with the veggies still crunchy but not "raw".

I made up some Egg Foo Young sauce to serve on the side.  This is basically a Chinese brown sauce:  stock or water, with soy sauce, a bit of rice wine or rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar, I added in some Chinese oyster sauce I had in the pantry, a little bit of sugar or honey if it needs a bit of depth, thickened with cornstarch.  You can find a lot of variations of the sauce in Chinese cookbooks or online.

linking to The Country Homemaker Blog Hop; Sunny Simple Sunday