Back to churches, one time the church I was at decided that they wanted a Hawaiian luau. I managed to get a seventy-five pound porker, and, in one of the enormous trays that they had in the kitchen, managed to cook the thing whole.
On another occasion, a church, in Eugene, Oregon, where I was taking my masters degree, wanted to do an Easter dinner, but they wanted to do it as close as possible to a Passover Seder dinner. Americans are not great at "foreign" foods, particularly since they don't actually believe that there are any other countries in the world. So, nobody in the church knew how to cook lamb. In fact, it *wasn't* lamb that they had, but goat legs, that a farmer had donated.
I didn't know this at the time that I volunteered, I only knew that they were asking for volunteers to help out with the dinner. When I volunteered, the woman in charge asked me if I knew how to cook lamb. I said yes. I had never actually cooked lamb in my life, up to that point. (But, hey, it's meat, right?) And then I learned about all the subtle oddities that they wanted for the dinner. They were thinking of baking the lamb in the oven, and I said, well, if you really wanted to be as close as possible to a traditional seder, the lamb is supposed to be roasted, and the closest thing would be barbecuing. The church didn't have a barbecue, so I dug up a hole in the backyard, and covered it with one of the grills from the commercial ovens. I built a fire in the fire pit, and barbecued the goat legs. At one point, as people were starting to show up to help with the meal preparation, somebody came up and said everyone in the neighborhood hates you. Everyone, that is, except the burger place across the street, which is doing land office business. Everyone else is frantically hungry because of the wonderful smells of the barbecuing meat for the past three hours.
As noted, Mom taught me portion cooking. In this particular case, they had decided on rice, as the starch for the meal, and I had suggested baking it in the oven. We had to very large pans of rice ready to go, and, standing at the head of the line plating the food, I just started dishing up with a scoop of rice per plate. I finished the first pan and started into the second. As the second pan was getting empty, I was realizing that nobody had given any indication that we were nearing capacity in terms of the number of plates. I kept on going until somebody called out that was the last plate needed: everybody had food. I looked in the pan. There was one scoopful left.
As I say, I have helped out with dinners and receptions at a lot of churches. Since I've spent an awful lot of time in an awful lot of different kitchens, I appear to have developed a kind of sense for where things are in a kitchen. Where people will put the cutlery. Where people will put the plates. Where people will put the glasses. Where people will store canned goods, and where they will store oil and spices. Therefore, I can walk into a kitchen; any kitchen, even a church kitchen, which are somewhat different given that they are designed by a committee rather than an individual; and find where various things are that are needed for whatever project is underway. So I help out with men's breakfasts. I help out with church dinners. I help out with funeral and memorial service receptions. I know my way around a kitchen. Within a week of being in Port Alberni, I was helping out at the memorial service of a woman whom I had never met, but who was very, very important to this particular congregation. All the normal church kitchen ladies wanted to attend her service. So, simply by being available to be in the kitchen, I allowed all of them to do that. When everybody was upstairs, someone came in, and wanted a cup of coffee. I pointed out that the large perk coffee urn had finished its cycle, so he was welcome to help himself to a cup. That's when we discovered that the church ladies, in their upset over losing so important a one of their number, had, in fact, made one hundred cups of hot water. Fortunately, having discovered this, we were able to find one of them in the service, get her to put actual coffee into the machine, and then I babysat it while she went back upstairs. The minister went a bit overtime in his message to the congregation for that service, which was a good thing, because for my by the time he was finished, so was the coffee.
At one time, I had some sourdough culture, and kept it alive and useful for some years. When I went to visit a friend, he wanted me to bring some, so that he could use it. So I packed up a sample as securely as I could, and took it with me on the trip, which was several hours. We knew that I would arrive at his place while he was still at work, so he had left a key for me. When I got there, I figured that the culture had been through enough, and mixed it up with some flour and water to keep it going, and settle in to it's new environment. In doing that, I spilled some flour, so I used the spilled four and some other ingredients to make an apple crumble. When my friend got home, I explained why the dessert was ready: I had made a mistake, and fixed it by making apple crumble. He sounded off: he loved apple crumble, and was annoyed that people only made it to fix cooking mistakes.
When Gloria and I married, we had both run our respective households, and so were competent in the basics of living. As both of us were working, we divided up the chores. Gloria always liked fabric, all aspects of fabric and textiles, so she took on the laundry. I, somewhat naturally, took on cooking and shopping.
Gloria was no slouch as a cook, and certainly she had kept the girls alive. She just didn't like cooking as much as she liked laundry. Although I'm not sure that it would be fair to say that she liked laundry: she was good at it and knew pretty much everything about it. (I did teach her about washing soda, when one family member got to the point of wearing clothes too long and they started to smell.) Gloria did make the world's best potato salad. Somebody once told her that potato salad was not so much a recipe, as an expression of love.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d2-cooking.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-21-teaching.html
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