Intro - Preparing Thanksgiving dinner 3X a day for 110 people

It’s been awhile. The holidays are long gone but I haven’t done any cooking I desired to write about until these last 2 weeks. At the end of February I went on a medical mission with Cascade Medical Team, http://www.cmt-oregon.org, to Guatemala. The team itself had about 78 volunteers. The additional number of people included military guards, interpreters and personnel from the parent organization of our team HELPS:  http://www.helpsintl.org . The team’s goal is to provide medical care for the Mayan indigenous population in rural Guatemala. We left on February 24 and returned on March 7.

I have no medical skills but I can cook. So I signed up for the kitchen team. Officially, we are called Culinary. Much more prestigious if you ask me, right up there with Julia and Jacque. There were 4 adults and 2 teenagers assigned to Culinary. Then we had a couple of ringers (those who had served on the Culinary team in the past) who dropped in on various days to help out. And a few other team members dropped in to help now and then. Plus two wonderful young Guatemalan women who kept our pots clean, the fruit sliced and the onions chopped.

I have cooked large meals. I did a lasagna dinner for 50, once. I helped do a Mexican dinner for 50, once. There were meetings prior to the trip. The team leaders gave an overview of the work but really you have no idea what’s about to happen until you get there. A lot of the meals and days are a blur. The following may not be totally accurate but by the end of the week I was so tired and happy it doesn’t really matter. 

Arriving at the Clinic

Dining Area

The Kitchen



Setting up Lunch

My experiences are listed by day.





Day 1 - Cathy Likes Cookies

We arrived at the compound mid-day. The advance team had setup the kitchen and prepared some food for lunch. That left dinner. We made spaghetti. Keep in mind most of the ingredients are institutional. We took many jars of Prego sauce and doctored it up. The clinic is at 8000 feet, it took a while to boil the water for the pasta. We cracked 3 (or was it 4) large juice pitchers full of eggs for breakfast the next day and prepared sack lunches for the construction team  leaving in the morning. 

Arriving at the Compound

Pringles Plaza, our outdoor dining area

Dessert was Chocolate Chip cookies. The team leader asked who can bake? I bake. Great we need dessert, bake enough cookies for 110 people to have a couple with dinner plus we need to send some out with the construction crew. I believe I made around 20 dozen. Half with nuts and half without. Or this may have been the day that brownies were made. We used industrial size Ghiradelli brownie mixes. Anyway it was a lot of both.

Day 2 – Solola Field Trip

Coffee starts at 5 a.m., breakfast is served at 6:30 a.m. I arrived about 5 and started in. Eggs, bacon, sliced fruit, cereal and toast. Breakfast over at 8. Then we start in on lunch.

I can’t remember what we fixed that first full day for lunch because I was gone most of the morning. I was asked to go into the local town, Solola, for a shopping trip with one of the HELPS people. He is Guatemalan and is learning some English. So far, he's got yes and ok and thank you down. Pretty much the extent of my Spanish is si, banos and gracias (oh and cervaza but we were an alcohol free facility so it wasn't relevant). We got along great.

We needed industrial size coffee filters for the giant coffee pot always going in the dining room. Paper towels were working but it would be nice to have actual filters. My HELPS guide took us to a grocery store where we found regular size filters. He began filling up the cart. I knew they were the wrong ones. No, No (see my Spanish was increasing) I said. Mas grande. These won't work (like he understood this). Anyway we got to an understanding and put back the filters. All in all it was a grand expedition and I got to see the countryside outside the compound.

Main Square in Solola

Dinner was Chicken Dijon and rice pilaf. I believe this was the afternoon I made brownies for dessert. There was fruit, rolls and a vegetable. We had two large gas (we were using propane) ranges to cook with. The cook-tops worked great. Six burners on each. When we really got cooking the whole thing was going. One oven worked pretty well. It had a regular knob to turn it on. Using an oven thermometer, it was determined to be fairly accurate. If the oven was set to 350 it eventually got to 350 and held fairly steady around that temp, although it tended to be a bit hot after a long period.

The other oven was totally off. First of all, it took us 2 days to figure out how to even turn it on. It has some electronic gizmo to set it. When set at 350 it would never get above 300. The highest it would register on the electronic control was 379 and that was 325-350 if you were lucky. We really needed 2 working ovens given the amount of food to be cooked but we had what we had. With 4 large pans of rice to bake and 4 large pans of chicken to bake and brownies to bake it was pan juggling to get everything done.

The Chicken Dijon (made with yellow mustard, the request for some dijon was not fulfilled) was delicious. The yellow mustard worked great, especially since it was mixed with cream and other spices. It is a specialty of one of the team leaders, John. Really it should be Chicken DiJohn. So after dinner, egg cracking and construction crew lunch making the evening ended. Dead tired, feet beginning to ache and gratified to have fed the team I climbed into my top bunk in the dorm (7 women sharing one room), put my earplugs in (to block out snoring) and fell asleep. The alarm went off way too early at 4:30 a.m.

Day 3 - Cinnamon, Part 1

5 a.m. start and a similar breakfast, sausage instead of bacon as I recall. Soup for lunch with leftover chicken. One gigantic pot had rice and the other had noodles. Plus sliced fruit and cookies. Dinner was an enchilada bake. More egg cracking at night. The team leader asked me if I was up to making cinnamon rolls; from scratch without a mixer at 8000 feet. Sure, why not. I started the cinnamon rolls after lunch. The roll part of the recipe called for 70 cups of flour, 30 eggs , 3 pounds of butter, sugar and yeast. All kneaded by hand. I had help but it was something else. My co-roll maker had never made cinnamon rolls so we had fun together learning how to need and shape. After the first rise and assembly into the pans, they are refrigerated for an overnight rest.

Day 4 - Cinnamon, Part 2

As previously, breakfast is at 6:30 a.m. The cinnamon rolls have to warm up and raise before baking for an hour or so. You do the math. I got up at 3:30 a.m. and wandered down to the kitchen to pull the cinnamon rolls out of the fridge and turned on the oven. I noticed the bacon was still frozen from the night before so I spread it out better hoping it would thaw in time for breakfast. I started the frosting: powdered sugar, milk, butter, vanilla and Crema (Guatemalan cream cheese). Yum… All of this was mixed by hand. There is no mixer in the CMT kitchen.

I had enough pans full of rolls for at least 2 for each person. We averaged about 110 people at each meal. The one oven that worked properly could hold 4 of the pans. I popped the first 4 pans in and set the timer.  As the rolls came out of the oven, the rest of the team had been preparing the other dishes for breakfast. We frosted them up and were on time to serve at 6:30!

At 8000 feet there are several challenges to cooking. Everything takes longer to cook and you have to adjust recipes to accommodate the altitude. We had many bags of black beans. The team leader expressed frustration in years past with getting dried beans to cook properly at the high altitude. Maybe I had a sure fire way to get them cooked properly:  brine the beans. Soak them in salt water. So we started the soak on Wednesday with the hope that letting them soak for 2 days would be enough. I nor the team leader knew if it would work but we were going to give it a try.

Dinner had a Middle Eastern flare. Chicken, peppers, onion and seasoning pan sautéed together, rice pilaf, lentil salad, fruit. It was delicious, kudos to the team leader for this recipe.

Day 5 - 26 Dozen

Day 5 – We had fabulous pancakes for breakfast. I got to sleep in this day so I didn’t participate in prep but it was great to be served such good pancakes. Lunch was lentil soup. Dinner was pork loin. Everything was a blur of food, cleanup, more food, more cleanup, more cookies by day 5. I made 26 dozen oatmeal cookies. Half with chocolate chips, half with raisins, half of each of those with nuts.

Day 6 – Happily Exhausted

Breakfast as usual and then we packed everything up. We served sandwiches for lunch and pizza was ordered in for dinner, from Dominos, really. It wasn’t too bad but then I was ready to stop cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 110 people 3X a day.

The actual meals listed may not have been on the exact day. As I said it became a blur and I didn’t keep notes each day. I can’t wait to do it again. It meant a lot to me to serve the people who were providing the medical care for the Mayans on our mission. I didn’t get to interact much with the Mayans but I helped make sure the team had an abundance of good food to keep them going while helping the patients. Here are the stats from this mission:

CLINIC: Total 924 patients

General-366

Gyn- 126

Pediatrics- 254

Dental- 178

Surgeries: 84

Hernias- 39

OB/GYN- 11

Gall Bladders- 7

Dental- 5

Misc General - 22

Community Development Projects:

Comadrona (mid-wives): training for approx 24 Guatemalan women

ONIL Stove Combos: 66 homes

ONIL Institutional stove: 1

ONIL Water Filters: 66 plus 8 in schools and 1 in health clinic at Santa Lucia

Kitchen:

Served approx 2070 meals!!

Thank you to the entire team for all their encouragement and support. My team leaders are wonderful people who I am looking forward to working with in the future. If anyone who reads this is interested in doing a medical mission, go to the CMT website,http://www.cmt-oregon.org, for more info. Adios for now.