Sunday Dinners

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, since last October I have been making Sunday dinner each week at my church. We have a Taize-style service in the evening at 5:00, dinner at 6:00, and usually some kind of class at 7:00. Between now and Lent, the class is a book discussion.

I usually plan and shop for the meals, but I have a great team of other volunteers who help me cook each week. Janet calls herself my sous chef, even though she has more experience in a professional kitchen than I do. She makes the desserts each week, always has great suggestions, and when things do not go as expected she is the one with whom I brainstorm. As you will read below, I was very glad she was helping last night! Rick and Sally are one of those couples who kind of stay in the background at a church, but they make things happen. It's great to have them helping weekly. One of the things that Sally does is coordinate a rotating group of other volunteers so that we usually have about 6 people in the kitchen each week.

We make sure that these dinners are not standard church potluck meals. No tuna hotdish or jello with unidentified pieces of fruit when I'm cooking! Last night, our Spanish menu was suppose to be tapas, a mixed green and citrus salad, paella, a flourless orange/almond cake, and sangria.

On weeks when there is a class following the dinner, we have average a crowd of about 25. That's a great size to cook for. It is enough to get some savings from buying ingredients wholesale, it is not hard to adapt either catering or home recipes for that size, it is not too big to serve everything buffet style in one shot, and 2-3 hours is enough time for the prep work and cooking.

So last night we were expecting between 25-30 and 45 showed up. Some people come to the service and stay for dinner. Some come for dinner and stay for the class. A few just come for the dinner. We never know just how many we need to feed until about 5 minutes before it is time to serve. One of the ways that I know I am suppose to be feeding people at this point in my life is that I enjoy the adrenalin rush that comes when we realized the crowd was at least 50% larger than expected and we don't have enough food. Time to improvise!

The first thing we did was to serve the food in courses. When people slow down, they don't eat as much. That also gave us some extra time.

Course #1 was the tapas (Janet made almond-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon and she marinated some olives), the salad, and the sangria. There was not anything we could about the tapas. I buy mesclun greens by the case, so we had enough greens to double up on the salad. We had also prepared a non-alcoholic version of sangria (a.k.a. fruit punch) but being an Episcopal church, nobody wanted that! The priests had several bottles of wine stashed somewhere in the building (I don't think we raided the communion wine) so we were able to turn the non-alcoholic sangria into the real thing. That's kind of like turning water into wine, right?

Course #2 was the paella. I made a large paella with shellfish and a second one with just chicken and chorizo for anyone with shellfish allergies. (OK, here's a confession. Part of the reason we served the meal in courses is that the shellfish paella was took too long to cook and was not quite ready at 6:00. It had to do with the size of the pan and the layout of the stove)

Everyone was able to get at least a small serving of paella (and they left much of the soccarat - the crusty brown rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan - so Janet and I was able to eat the best part of the paella while cleaning up!)

Course #3 was pasta. Janet had made a bolognese sauce last week to keep in reserve, so we defrosted it and served it with pasta. We don't always keep a backup in the freezer, but I think we will from now on!

The dessert course involved a series of improvisations from Janet. She took her two orange/almond cakes and stretched them by serving it in ice cream sundae glasses. She topped it with an orange sauce and some cream she whipped with cinnamon. As soon as we realized how large the crowd was, she hurried over to the grocery store to buy some ice cream. It was also served in sundae glasses topped with a chocolate espresso sauce she threw together like it was nothing. Between those two desserts, everyone who wanted to break their New Year's diet resolution was able to do so.