Ingredients:

80 pounds 90% lean ground beef.

10 pounds instant oatmeal

54 eggs

9 pounds diced baby carrots

8 pounds sliced mushrooms (fresh)

200 ounces pulverized tomatoes

200 ounces spaghetti sauce

12 pounds frozen hash browns

10 steam table disposable pans with lids

Preparations:

Coat the inside of the steam table pans with a spray on vegetable oil like Pam.

Evenly divide the meat in the pans and press flat in pans

Set pans to side.

Dice the carrots into pieces approxmately 1/4 of an inch in size.

Cut mushrooms into small bits, size is unimportant but no whole mushrooms.

Combine the carrots and mushrooms and divide evenly into the pans of meat. Mix well into the meat.

Add oatmeal to each pan, approximately 1 pound per pan. Mix with the blend of meat/carrot/tomatoe.

In a separate pan, mix the eggs, approximately 80 ounces of the spaghetti sauce  and seasonings of your choice (I use a healthy dose of Cajun spices, but Tony Chacheri’s seasoning will do nicely.) Mix thoroughly and then add a healthy dollop of Chile powder and some black pepper and salt. Again, this is to your taste, and if you’re serving a group of people who don’t get a lot of spicy food keep it a little tame.

Once the mix is completely blended, add to the pans and knead into the mix. When you are done you should have a nice, moist mixture but not “wet” by any means. If it is, add a little more oatmeal to the mix until it is solid enough to form.

Mound the pans so that you have  a place around the edges for the juice to collect.

Spread approximately 1 cup of Spaghetti sauce on top of each pan, cover with foil or the lids that came with the pans, and refrigerate overnight.

The morning you are going to serve, heat the oven to 425 and bake the meatloaf for 2 hours with the lid in place. When you are a half hour from serving, spread the remaining spaghetti sauce on top of the meat and let the pans finish without the lids. (keep the lids, because you’ll use them to keep the meatloaf warm and moist while you’re serving your people.

This mix works like a charm. We’ve fed hundreds of people with it. The rest of the meal consists of butter noodles (again, just a touch of Cajun seasoning in the water along with some salt and oil) and canned corn, fresh salad, desert, coffee, water and milk.

We can easily feed 300 people with this recipe and the total cost per guest is under $2.00. It’s much lower if you get donated goods but we just buy it all at Sam’s Club and have a blast doing so.

More on this later when I get up, but wanted to get the recipe up before I crashed for the day.