How to Use Bread Crust? Strata!

 A couple of weeks ago our church had a big Ladies' Tea and we helped out in the kitchen with food preparation.  We made about 150 cucumber sandwiches, trimmed off the crusts, and cut them into 3 small sandwiches each.  Lorraine, our awesome queen of the kitchen, never wastes anything.  She asked us to stuff all the trimmed off crusts into the empty bread bags.  But then what?  What do you do with 8 bags of bread crusts?  Well, I took two home because I knew it would make Lorraine happy to know they weren't going to waste and I made strata - twice.

I had a MOPS meeting coming up and I'd committed to bring a hot dish.  Breakfast casserole is very inexpensive to make and easy to transport in my insulated hot dish bag so I figured I'd make a strata to use up some bread crusts.  It's basically just using bread in place of potatoes and more milk.

A very tiny amount of the bread crusts.  You can see bits of cucumber.

Bread, cooked sausage, and cheese

Add eggs and milk, then pop in the over at 350.

I didn't take a photo afterward, but it looked yummy.  It was super moist and the sausage was flavorful but the rest was pretty bland.  Also the occasional cucumber bite tasted odd.   One 9 X13 pan only used 1/3 a bag of crusts so there will be more strata in our future.  I'm going to try and mix it up with bacon, ham, veggies, and other spices so it isn't so bland as it was this time.  I'll also probably pull the cucumber bits out. 

I might also make croutons to use some of those crusts up.

Katie