Eggs-tra large helping

Ran on Friday, June 8, 2007

Eggs-tra large helping
Thousands show up to chow down on hearty breakfast fare

By Keighla Schmidt
Leader-Telegram staff

Consider this early morning menu: 7,500 eggs, 3,200 muffins, 4,600 cups of coffee, 3,000 pints of milk, 300 pounds of cheese, 100 pounds of custard, 100 pounds of strawberries and 15 cases of corn flakes.
Quite the breakfast - Breakfast in the Valley, that is.
More than 3,000 people were expected to eat their morning meal today in the company of local farmers, people from the business community and others at the Eau Claire County Exposition Center.
“It’s a good breakfast,” said Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce President Bob McCoy. “People come for the interaction with friends and to meet new people.”
Those in attendance, who started lining up before 5 a.m., agreed.
“We come to see people,” said Jillyn Geissler of Eau Claire, who with her husband, Rick, and children have been coming to the breakfast for years.
“We don’t usually come this early,” Jillyn Geissler said at 6:45 a.m. “But my husband has to get to work.”
Oz and Erma Hegenbarth of Eau Claire said they attend the breakfast each year because they’re awake and it’s on the way to the mall, where they walk.
“It’s good food,” Erma Hegenbarth said. “We see people we know.”
The Geissler and Hegenbarth families weren’t the only ones to eat an early breakfast today. From 5 to 6 a.m., the first hour, 555 people were served, McCoy said.
The merging of the agriculture and business communities has driven the Chamber of Commerce to continue the annual breakfast for 11 years.
“It’s really important to show the significance of agriculture to the community,” McCoy said.
Before Breakfast in the Valley, the chamber hosted a free breakfast for farm families each year. After 40 years, the attendance numbers were low and the need for a revamp was recognized.
McCoy said Chippewa Valley Technical College provided two 4-foot skillets to cook eggs for the first breakfast when about 1,000 people showed up.
The skillets still are used today, and it takes a team to make the 500 scrambled eggs each one holds. In addition to the eggs, 10 pounds of ham, 10 pounds of mushrooms, 7 pounds of cheese and a pound of butter are cooked to feed 160 mouths.
There are “egg flippers,” spotters, who constantly clean the floor, and shovelers who take children’s plastic snow shovels to transfer the eggs from the skillet to the warmer.
“It works great,” chef Brian Schneider said. “It’s really amazing.”