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.

My poor, neglected blog

It's been over a month without any activity on my blog. Sigh.

In the past month...

1. I felt proud to be an American. I think part of the reason I have not been writing much (or even reading other blogs) is that after the election I felt a huge sense of relief. Before the election, I felt like I had to know everything I could about the world of politics on a daily basis because some new horrible thing might be happening. Beginning on January 20, adults will be back in the White House.
   
   Four years ago, when we re-elected a president who we knew authorized torture, I think I was depressed for weeks. I could not believe what we had done. It only took a couple of years for the American public to really understand what kind of president Bush has been, but the reasons his approval ratings have been at record lows were all evident four years ago. Obama has a lot of crap to undo.
   
   
2. The National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced that we have been in a recession.
   
   
3. I have tried to buy a house. At the moment, it looks like I need to start over.
   
   
4. I bought a new camera. My old one ended up getting something stuck inside the lens, so there was a mark on the right side of every picture. You can see an example below.
   
   I looked into getting the camera repaired, but it would have cost about $200 just for the shop to open it up and clean it. Not only would there be no guarantee that the $200 would actually fix the problem, but it could take up to 8 weeks for me to get the camera back. That would be cutting it too close to my trip to Hong Kong, so I bit the bullet and got a SLR. I hope to have lots of practice with it before my trip. Here's an action shot of the puppy from my first practice session.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. I've been making dinner every Sunday night at my church this fall. It's been a great experience. I'll be writing more about these dinners in the future.
   
   
6. It's Advent! My favorite time of year music-wise has arrived. I rarely listen to classical music, but that changes in December. Today we did Lessons & Carols at church, which included some pretty tough pieces. I have not participated in Christmas Eve services at my church before, but based on the music we are preparing, it should be amazing.
   

Cookbooks

In the past couple of months, I've gone on something of a book buying spree. I am definitely of the camp that believes it is impossible to own too many books. Not only did I get the stack of books picture to the right, but I also needed to get more shelving for them! If you look at the picture carefully, you might notice a theme. Not only are they all cookbooks, but most of them deal specifically with feeding crowds.

My church in Kansas City, St. Andrews, has a Taize-style Candlelight Communion service on Sunday evenings. The service consists of meditative music, readings, silence, and communion. The worshipers generally leave the service in silence.

One of the goals (but certainly not the only goal) behind this service, as I understand it, was to provide a worship opportunity that might be meaningful to the community at the nearby UMKC campus. There have been people from UMKC who attend regularly, but it has been difficult for them and the other members of the congregation to get to know one another.

Adding a meal following the service to facilitate community building was discussed in the initial planning for the Candlelight Communion, but there was nobody willing or able to provide leadership towards making that happen. I have volunteered to be a part of a team to provide that leadership in the fall. We will spend this summer planning and hope to begin the dinners in September. I think that my role will be to plan menus and provide guidance to the volunteers who will help me prepare the meals each week. I would be happy if we had around 15 people stay for dinner in the beginning.

I was a member of a church in Pittsburgh that had a Saturday evening worship service that was followed by a meal. That meal was an essential part of the life of the community who worshiped at the Saturday Celebration. That should not be a surprise to anyone who has ever read the Bible; many significant Biblical events occur over a meal (Jesus' first miracle, the Last Supper, many of the Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, and of course one of the primary images of heaven is that of a feast)

I am excited to explore how this might help me bridge the gap between the two sides of my professional life. Until now, I always worked for either a church or a faith-based non-profit. You could say I was all about being a conduit so that people could be fed spiritually. Now I am focused on feeding people physically. This fall I hope to do both at the same time.