I am having multiple issues with my element in angular and am trying to understand what is going on. My first step is to understand why the multiple
The getOtherOrderDates will be called in each digest cycle so that angular knows whether to update options in select. That's most likely the reason you're seeing this method being called many times.
If you're worried about performance impact of this loop you can build the options upfront inside your controller store it in $scope like so:
$scope.options = $scope.getOtherOrderDates($scope.Bread.text);
whenever $scope.Bread.text changes and then use $scope.options inside your template.