Dinner for a Crowd

A couple of months ago I was asked to prepare a meal for the college group at church. Our church offers the students a free meal before their worship/teaching session on Sunday nights. I quickly agreed - clearly not having fully calculated the level of involvement.

My turn came around and I asked the college administrative assistant how many students I should be preparing for and she replies with . . . 175. What?! Well, I guess I knew that the college group had grown since Jesse and I had been apart of it. But, for some reason, that was at least twice as many students as I had expected. I guess I just didn't think it all the way through. Oh well, there was no turning back now.

I came up with a menu: chicken enchiladas, refried beans, chips & salsa, veggies & dip, and cookies. And, multiplied the menu to accomodate 175 people. That's a 30 lbs. of chicken and a whole heck of a lot of tortillas, refried beans and green chiles! Thankfully, between the bulk food store and Wal-Mart all of my groceries were available.

I spent a couple of hours on Saturday - with the music turned up loud - chopping vegetables.


Then, Sunday I gathered my college small group girls together to help me prepare. They rolled 250 enchiladas, made veggie dip and arranged the veggie and cookie trays. They did such a great job!




Here's the food ready to be served. (No pictures of refried beans because refried beans in bulk should never be photographed)







In the end it all went well. We ended up with about twice as many enchiladas as we needed. But, we were able to plate them up and hand them out to students as they left. The boys especially were very happy about that!

I even got this email from one of the students, "...dinner last night was superb. I heard so many people say it was one of the best so thank you so much for the time and energy you and your girls put into it. :)"

Isn't that so great?! I'm just glad it's over . . . until next time.