A Party of 40

For those of you who don't remember, or in case you've missed how much I've blathered on about it, Trevor and I were in charge of making the Break the Fast dinner for our branch on Sunday. Oh wait. I mean the Break the Fast near-disaster. Okay, so the meal itself wasn't really bad, but, truthfully, problem after problem arose in the preparation of it that I very nearly went crazy. But with Trevor's invaluable help and much support from people in the branch, we were eventually able to combat the problems with the skill of amateur caterers and I was able to make edible food for 40 people yesterday. A true accomplishment for such a novice.

This is not to say that I'm a cooking novice, per se, because I do enjoy the art and consider myself somewhat adequately trained to feed my family of three and the occasional guests. But I have never:

• cooked dinner for 40 people
• cooked dinner for 40 people on what I would consider a rather tight budget
• cooked dinner for 40 people in a foreign country
• cooked dinner for 40 foreign people
  
• cooked dinner for 40 people without a car to transport the supplies
• and finally, I have never cooked dinner for 40 people using the bare minimum of ingredients, because many that I am used to are hard to come by in Poland.

With that said, here's how it all played out.

The week before, I feverishly searched the internet for recipe ideas and guidelines for cooking for a crowd. Armed with a massive shopping list on Saturday morning, Trevor, Anna, and I met Krzysztof, the first counselor in the branch presidency, at the church (which is just one floor of an office building in the center of the city, by the way), and then we all went to the open market a few blocks away to purchase the supplies. Here was the menu:

• Potato and Bacon Soup (In Poland, you always start dinner with a soup, so Trevor convinced me that one would be necessary. Since I'm quite new at soups, I felt like this was the only one that I could confidently make and make sure it tasted okay.)
• Green salad
• Spaghetti
• Garlic bread
• Cooked carrots
• Banana splits

So you can imagine our shopping list: 30 potatoes, 24 carrots, 10 onions, 30 cloves of garlic, 6 pounds of ground beef, etc. I guess I should have done more research, but I basically had no idea how much everything would cost, so I felt like we were going into it totally blind—with Krzysztof there to witness it. He helped us SO much both days, and he's pretty much the kindest man ever, but I did feel more scared to mess up with him standing right there. That way I couldn't hide my mistakes. Anyway, we purchased most of the food there at the open market and then took it back to the church. Keep in mind that shopping like this is just a different story when you're planning on carrying it all home in your arms or on your back. But we were ready for that. What we weren't ready for was the rain. It was just a slight drizzle, but it just complicated things getting home. I considered that the first challenge of the event. (As a sidenote: The rain actually turned out to be a blessing. On our way to the market, I drove the stroller through some dog poo, and because there were so many puddles, it washed right off! A miracle!)

Trevor and Krzysztof at the open market

Anyway, once we got to the church, Krzysztof and I got started on the preparation while Trevor went to a bigger store pretty far away to get 168 oz. of canned tomatoes, 72 oz. of tomato paste, salad dressing, and the meat. Thankfully, Trevor ran into a man from our branch who gave him a ride to the store and back. So we peeled and chopped a million vegetables while Anna roamed the kitchen, getting into every drawer she shouldn't, and we couldn't keep her away from the oven. Oh, how she loved the knobs. It was driving me crazy. Challenge #2: Cooking for 40 with a busy toddler running under your feet. Thank heavens they had a crib at the church so that she could take a nap. That saved our lives.

Trevor and Marion, the man who drove him to the store, eventually came back and we all worked together. It took some extra effort to get Anna to go to sleep in the strange new bed, so while Trevor was doing that, I was left with Krzysztof and Marion in the kitchen. While they were eager to help and Krzysztof did speak a little English, we still had some difficulties communicating because of the obvious language barrier. Challenge #3: Trying to give instructions in my severely limited Polish...but I usually just ended up doing a few charades to make sure they understood, which I guess could be construed as an amusing distraction from all the stress.

some of the food — doesn't really need an explanation

Anyway, we were there until about 6 p.m.. We were completely and totally knackered. (This word is one of the souvenirs I brought home from London. If you want to see how graphic it really is, check out the definition of the word it derived from.) We were so ready to go home, but things looked promising with the soup made, the spaghetti sauce done, and all the vegetables chopped for the salad and the cooked carrots. The sauce still didn't taste great, but I was banking on the "it always tastes better the next day" theory about soups and sauces.

So we left the church and met up with Challenge #4: the icy hurricane. The rain had turned into, yes, a hurricane at this point. And it was oh so cold. Within about 12 minutes, the time it took us to walk from our tram stop to our apartment, we were completely soaked and freezing. Trevor and I had to take turns pushing the stroller because when our hands were out of our pockets, they were instantly frostbitten. We had to jump over rivers of water flowing down the street or sometimes walk right through them because there was no way to get the stroller around them. My socks were completely wet, and I arrived home looking exactly like a drowned rat because the hood of my coat likes to fly off in the wind. The pictures below will show you how wet my coat and pants were and how the rain had soaked through onto my shirt in rather teenagerly embarrassing places (so embarrassing that Trevor couldn't avoid taking a picture).



After we all dried off, I still had to run to the store across the street and pick up some supplies for the chocolate sauce I was going to make that night. My feet hurt and I didn't want to leave my warm and dry home ever again, but I did it and the sauce turned out to be quite delicious, if I do say so myself.

The next morning, we arrived early at the church and got started warming things up...only to find out that the soup had gone bad. Challenge #5: rotten soup. That was pretty disappointing. I thought that the fridge would be big enough to hold the soup, but it wasn't. All we could do was set it on the windowsill and open the window overnight. It was pretty cold that night, but not cold enough. It was pretty funny to see all three of us (me, Trevor, and Krzystof) repeatedly tasting the soup, hoping that it was still good, but then being instantly disgusted by the taste of spoiled milk. Luckily we still had enough food to feed everyone, but I was sad that all of those ingredients were wasted.

I basically spent all morning trying to make the sauce taste better, but it was tough because you had to add like a cup of spices to taste any difference. It ended up okay, though. As we got closer to eating time, we started heating a huge pot of water to boil the pasta. We were using an electric kettle to boil smaller amounts of water to speed the process up, only to have the power go out right as we were doing this. Challenge #6: a power outage. At this point I couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or cry. I ended up laughing because otherwise the food wouldn't be ready in time if I took a minute to cry. I couldn't really see the sauce in the dark, but I stirred and stirred anyway. The lights came on a few minutes later, but I seriously felt like I was getting opposition at every turn.

more food and preparations

here you can catch a glimpse of my chic church apron

this picture doesn't really show anything new, but I loved how it captured Trevor's utter disdain for me making him wait so I could take his picture

After the meetings were over, people started streaming into the kitchen to see what was going on, and I had to keep telling Trevor to herd them out. I was too stressed out to have people looking over my shoulder. And then Ewa and Bartek arrived. Trevor met Ewa at the university and she had invited us over for dinner twice, but we were sick and then busy cooking this dinner. So Trevor invited her and her boyfriend to come eat with us at the church. It was cool because it was a subtle missionary experience but it presented Challenge #7, making it difficult to entertain whilst cooking for a crowd and going crazy. Trevor kept popping out into the hall to see how they were doing, but he didn't really get to talk to them at all.

By now it was time to eat. The water had finally boiled (I really think it took more than an hour) and the spaghetti was almost done, so we served the salad first and the promptly ran out of salad dressing. Oh well. And then the spaghetti, carrots, and garlic bread were served and we seemed to get pretty positive feedback. I could only understand a little of what people were telling me, but I got a lot of thumbs up, smiles, and belly rubbing. I also saw a few people inspecting the strange food, especially the garlic bread, because they just don't eat food like that here very often or if at all. And then Trevor didn't get to eat for a while because he was busy preparing the dessert, but he finally made it in, and he finally got to talk to Ewa and Bartek, and finally all was well. Here are some pictures of everyone eating the banana splits.

Karolina, our friend and my Polish tutor, is the third one from the left, Trevor's near the right, and Krzystof is on the very right

That's our branch president on the right.

In closing, I really have to hand it to Allrecipes.com. I couldn't have done it without a couple of the recipes and its abilities to do metric conversions and times each recipe by 6. I learned a lot about cooking for large groups (buy more salad dressing next time, make the soup the day of or refrigerate it properly, etc.), and we only narrowly avoided a disastrous event, but I don't think I'll be ready to do it again for a long, long time.

Here are a couple pictures of Anna doing the after-dinner, table-dancing entertainment so I can end on a happy note.