Catering

A few weeks ago, The Wife "voluntold" me for the job of catering a Toastmasters contest. When I agreed to help her out, I thought I'd be making breakfast for about twenty people.

This number grew and grew until Friday night, I was making fourteen pounds of hash brown casserole (10 pounds of potatoes, 2 pounds of cheese, 2 pounds of sausage), five dozen eggs, and getting 100-cup urns of coffee ready. I'm sure I had more than 60 people eating. The scarf-down foods were The Wife's banana bread, the danish eggs (scrambled with havarti cheese and chives) and a hundred of those little disposable coffee creamer cups. We've still got some hash brown casserole and fruit salad left over; I made smoothies for us yesterday.

We were up until one in the morning prepping and I got up again four hours later to finish the eggs and get everything set up. We weren't out of there until one in the evening. Probably eighteen man-hours of work went into that breakfast. The cooking part was fun but my legs and feet still hurt two days later. One of the Presidents of a club from Bakersfield asked me to cater their event. I was ambivalent, but now I'm not -- the late night and early morning, the stress and work, and the physical strain are not worth it; and the Toastmasters can't afford the fee I would charge. I'll do it for The Wife, but not for strangers.