Day 9 & Miracles

After my early-morning fishing extravaganza, I had work. Pasta night and prep. We busted out on prep and finished a bit late. Breakfast crew was struggling to get cleaned up in a decent amount of time, and we were slow on prep, so we started making dinner about an hour later than I would have liked to. By 3pm break, we had 1/12th of our noodles for 1300 people done, one sauce done and one halfway made. That seems reasonable, no? No. I love answering my own questions. "On time" would be defined as 'both sauces made, panned, and the equipment cleaned, and at least 75% of the noodles made and panned.' At the rate people were moving, we were between 2 1/2 and 3 hours behind getting dinner out on time. So I instituted some alternate cooking methods including but not limited to: boiling 32 gallons of water simultaneously in 8 separate pots, each with enough noodles to feed yourself, myself, my roomie, and the next five hours down the street for a week, the 60-gallon steam kettle, and both braising pans. In 45 minutes, we cooked pasta for 1000. That'll be $892.54 at the second window, please make sure your tractor trailer can fit around the corner and beneath the awning. And, if you're interested and happen to buy your pasta in 20lb cases, one case will feed approximately 200 people. You can do the rest of the math.

Dinner was finished on time, we had enough food, and we cleaned up the total mess we made and got off 15 minutes early. That may not seem like much, but you didn't see the mess we made. As we like to say in the kitchen, we cook messes, and the food we produce is a byproduct of the mess. But by the food service trio of standards (out on time, enough on time, clean on time), today was a success. But there was no earthly way possible that could have happened without devine intervention. We had one batch of pasta done between 2:30p and 3p. There were eleven more to go in an hour. Each batch takes between 15 and 20 minutes to cook, not including ~2 minutes to pull it out and reset. We managed to cook all eleven batches within that hour. I panned up the last of the pasta at 4:30p, exactly when staff line opened and all cooking needed to be finished by. Reminds me of a day last summer when the chicken had ran out and we suddenly found one last pan of chicken in the back of the warmer - enough to carry us through the last 100 campers.