One of the things that my mother did teach me was portion cooking. That is, the ability to cook for large numbers of people. I am not a gourmet, and I can't turn out anything fancy, and I don't know very much about bakery, pastries, or desserts. But I *do* know how to cook for 150 to 500 people.
I've used this in a variety of different ways over the years. I have cooked for logging and other work crews. I have cooked for residential children's camps.
One of my party pieces for use with this skill was the potluck pizza party. For an indeterminate size group, such as a volunteer organization, or a company party of some type, I would create a sign up sheet. Everybody would be bringing ingredients for pizza. The potluck part wasn't exactly potluck: when I made up the sign up sheet, beside every sign up space there would be an item to bring for pizza ingredients. The first entry would generally be four or five cans of tomato paste. Roughly every fifth item would be a half a pound of grated cheese. Roughly every sixth item would be a half a pound of sliced dry sausage or cubed ham. Other entries might be a pound of sliced onions, half a pound of sliced green peppers, and various other items that one might find on different varieties of pizza. As people signed up they would note what they were to bring for the party. As people showed up at the party, wherever it was, I'd bring along several pounds of refrigerated bread dough, which I had prepared beforehand and allowed to rise once. At the party venue, I would roll out pizza dough into whatever available baking sheets were available. As people showed up I would start assembling the ingredients that they brought. As the night wore on I would be creating a variety of different pizzas, depending on what had already showed up. This works nicely for anywhere upwards of a dozen people, and makes a nice change from the standard chips and dips.
As I said, I cooked for children's residents camps a number of times. I usually did a variation on pizza for at least one of meals. It wasn't the potluck version, of course, but I was able generally able to create a half a dozen different varieties of pizza for a dinner on the huge baking sheets that were generally available in commercial kitchens.
At one memorable winter camp, I was also asked to be the camp nurse, because I had an industrial first aid ticket at the time. At one point, during the camp, when one of my kitchen staff have made a particularly stupid mistake, I was reaming them out, when I realized that the entire kitchen had gone silent. I turned, and there was a woman in the door of the kitchen, looking at me, quite horrified. I asked what I could do for her, and she said, "Are you the camp nurse?" Yes, I said. She said, "I have a girl in my cabin who is having a difficult period." I said I don't make house calls.
One evening one of the campers was exhibiting symptoms of stomach pain. We couldn't determine what was wrong with him, and so took him off the island, over to Gibsons, and drove up to Sechelt to the hospital. There they x-rayed him, and found that his stomach was seriously distended. The medical staff finally got him to admit that he had had five servings of my meatloaf. I suppose it was a bit of a tribute to my cooking. But it was a little annoying, and, coming back to the island at three in the morning, and having to get up at six in order to make breakfast, I simply stayed up, making trays of uncooked cinnamon rolls that could be kept in the fridge for later use, and about a dozen lemon meringue pies, for use in the next few days. I had made up an enormous match of bread dough, which could be kept in the fridge, to make the buns, and also pizzas.
As it happened, the camp changed that particular day, and another camp came in. That day was New year's Eve, and so a party was planned for that evening's dinner, and after. I therefore planned the pizza dinner for that night. But, because I was short on sleep from the previous night's activities, I left the pizzas ready to be served cooked and served in the evening, and, giving instructions to the rest of the kitchen staff, went to bed early.
I was awakened by a strange sound, which I subsequently determined was the island's fire alarm. One of the cabins had, in fact, caught fire. On an island when there's a fire everybody turns out. The house was well and truly engulfed in flames and we didn't have proper firefighting equipment and certainly not sufficient training. However I went down with some others to make sure that the burning house didn't set fire to anything else. At one point, a son of one of my friends, who, at the time, had decided that he would like to be a firefighter when he grew up, ran into the house with a one pound dry chemical fire extinguisher, intending to fight the fire. I know it's not the right thing to do, and it was probably a fairly stupid decision, but at the time all I could think of to do was run in after him, grab him, and haul him back out of the burning house. Fortunately neither of us was injured.
Eventually the Gibsons volunteer fire department did respond to our fire. They, of course, had their own equipment, and, using our firefighting standpipe system, hooked up their pump, to our pipe, and ran hoses from a stand pipe up to the burning house. They did put the fire out, although the house was, by that time, completely destroyed. All of this activity had put paid to the evening's pizza party as most of the counselors and staff for the camp were fully involved in making sure that none of the kids attempted to get anywhere near the burning house. So we invited the volunteer fire department crew up to the camp and they joined in the pizza party.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1c-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-bcyp.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d2-cooking.html
No comments:
Post a Comment