Location: Breaking Bread Ministries/LaSalle Street Church
Date: Wednesday, October 05, 2016; 5:45-8:15 pm
I arrived and saw that the printed menu had a “Jack-o-lantern” picture, it being
October and all, though nothing on the menu looked “Fall related”. Marianne was
back from her vacation in France and in similar good spirits as last
month. After I had washed up, she
assigned me to opening cans of corn.
While some of them needed the big industrial can opener, many had a tab
that you could just pull open. Marianne
was helping me drain the corn and took this opportunity to tell me about some
of her meals while in France and also threw in a joke – “Why did a snail have a ‘S’ pained on the side of his car – Because he
wanted people to see a (e)’s’cargo(t)”.
Ugh
 |
| Marianne's "present" |
As I finished opening the cans, Chef Dan came and asked me
to separate the corn that we had collected into 3 pans and then insert in the steamer for 10 minutes. As the corn was
steaming, Chef told me to sauté some onions, tomatoes and peppers, till
translucent, and then add them to a pot having "creamed corn". Once the corn was steamed, I put it in 2 “4 inch pans” and added ladles of the "creamed corn" on them. Chef Dan then came
and added his spices and after I had mixed them in, he asked me to have a
taste. “Needs a bit of salt”, I said and he agreed. We added some more, I mixed and then put them
in the warmers outside. Chef called all
the volunteers together and presented Marianne with a chocolate block that was
shaped like a man wearing swimming trunks.
Hold on. What have I missed over
the last month?
I saw the guest who I knew and went and chatted with him for
a bit, discussing the menu for the evening.
Tonight’s we were serving salad with “French
dressing”, “Sloppy Joe’s” – a
large amount of meat was being cooked on the grill – with Corn, Roasted
potatoes and topped off by pickle slices.
Also, I had seen bacon being cooked, as well as apples being caramelized,
and learned that for dessert, there was vanilla ice cream topped with apples
and bacon. What! I helped another volunteer scoop out the ice
cream from the big tubs into individual cups and then we put them inside the
freezer. As we went in, I mentioned to
her that we wouldn’t last too long if the door to the freezer were to lock
behind us. She said that she would! We had 4 new people today and so Marianne
gave her speech. She talked about the
past 14 years and how sometimes people would leave for a few years and come
back. She said it was pleasing to see
them return to the “family”. I am not too sure about that. Wouldn’t we want them to leave and hope that
their circumstances had improved enough for them to stay away?
I took the assignment of plating, though many were
interested in that and Marianne over allocated that task. She also requested that I refill the juice as
the servers brought back empty jugs. We
had a few bottles of grape juice and a bottle of cranberry concentrate. We lined up and because there were a lot of
people plating, I wasn’t required to do much besides just top off the plate
with 2 pickle slices, besides the juice refilling. We had a big crowd in today and were busy.
Once the firsts were done, I took over the tallying duty for the seconds as
well as the volunteer meals. We had lot
of demand for seconds and eventually ran out of food, having to turn away a
few. At one stage a woman wanted to add
salad to her takeout container and I was too quick to put it in, causing her to
glare at me since I had mixed the salad with the “sloppy joe”. Totally my
fault! I helped stack all the chairs and
wheel them inside, being pretty tired at the end. I said goodbye to Marianne and mentioned that
I would try and stop by for the "volunteer breakfast" this Saturday where they thank us for our service.
No comments:
Post a Comment