I'm not sure if other churches have "Wednesday Night Dinners" like Baptists do, or if many Baptists even still have them Since we don't drive at night it has been a long time since we have gone to the dinner at our church. Probably things are a little different than they were when we had them at our church in Oklahoma City back in the eighties. It could be a little more professional these days, with caterers or professional cooks, maybe.
At first, different people at our church back then took turns cooking the meal for about eighty people every Wednesday. This was no easy feat using the church kitchen. Except for a few extra-large pots and a couple of steamers, the kitchen was no bigger, and probably smaller, than a lot of our home kitchens were. And no dishwasher. It probably was because of the no dishwasher situation that I volunteered to cook on a regular basis. If you cooked nobody expected you to clean up. For much of the time I "volunteered" my friend, Fran, to help also.
It should have been simple. We reasoned that we would just take the recipes and menus that we used for Fran's family of five or my family of four and multiply them by, oh, twenty or so. Piece of cake. Or make that cakes. It was a little difficult to calculate sometimes. People still talk, I hear, about the miracle of the Loaves and the Soup we served one night. Somehow I miscalculated how much homemade bread (Okay, frozen homemade. You still had to let it rise and bake it!) people would take when going through a buffet line. There was bread enough left over for everyone to take home and share with the neighbors. And the postman. And the crossing guard. And the birds. It was a lesson in giving.
Really, everything we cooked during that time was memorable. I've even had requests to tell you about a particularly fine meal we made: Beef Stroganoff. It is yummy, Dennis's favorite, in fact, and I still cook it, though in smaller quantities of course.
To avoid our Smurf-sized church kitchen we often did a lot of the preparation at home and transported it in the back of our station wagons, but for this we opted to do most of it the cooking at church. We had chopped the beef into cubes, sliced the mushrooms, stirred in the sour cream (I'm getting hungry as we sit here) and had it simmering on the four-burner stove. There were pans of dump cake set out on the counters (What, you never heard of dump cake? You dump in a can of fruit, you dump in a box of yellow cake mix, you dump in melted butter? Easy as.....cake.) The Cool Whip was in the fridge, Fran's colicky newborn daughter was in her swing. The rest of our children ran in and out of the kitchen and the gym right outside the kitchen. We had to have more space. And then it came to us. We could pre-cook the noodles, put them into the big steamers to keep warm and plug them in somewhere out of our way till we had everything else finished
Soon we were ready with Fran and Pat's Gourmet Dinner for Eighty. We had the lettuce cut up in big bowls for the salads, eighty pieces of cake sliced and set out artfully at the end of the folding tables we used for our buffet line. We unplugged the steamers and set them on the tables with the Stroganoff mixture next to them. It would be simple, for once. People could put the noodles on their plates, balancing them carefully---those foam plates can be killers---top them with the Stroganoff, and enjoy the delights of our labor.
As the diners milled around, tantalized by the luscious aromas, the pastor said grace and they began to file down both sides of the tables. To make it easier for them to serve themselves, I took the lid off the first steamer of noodles. Or, perhaps I should say Noodle. It was one solid, 18" by 30"x 6" Noodle. The second steamer was the same. Who knew that if you let pasta sit in a steamy environment for an hour or so it would congeal into one big mass? So we cut the Noodle into squares and topped it with the Stroganoff and ate it anyway.
Baptists will always eat. And they have good memories. I rarely see someone from back then who doesn't remind me of The Noodle. They haven't seen anything like it since.
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