Cooking for 60 (with babies).
One mama’s quest for community involvement and community engagement turned out to be, in a word: delicious. In two words: delicious chaos. In three words: inspirational delicious chaos. We could go on and on. Originally posted on The Intuitive Mama. Thank you to Jordann for letting us share some of the story here.
Chaos!
My moms’ group rocks! I feel so lucky to have been connected with such amazing, fun women. Yesterday was no exception. We decided to take on a huge project for one of our Moms’ group get-togethers. We cooked for 60 homeless youth at Janus Youth Shelter. In a normal situation, 8 women cooking for 60 people might not be such an undertaking, but there were also 8 VERY ACTIVE babies in the house while this was going on.
To describe it as chaos would be an understatement. But we pulled it off. And I think there are some Portland youth enjoying some pretty great food this week. In case you want to do something like this with your moms’ group, here’s how we organized. (I love when people explain seemingly easy things on their blogs because I always learn to do something in a new way….for that reason…here you go)
1) Get all the moms in a Facebook group, if they’re not already.
2) Pick the recipes and multiply the ingredients to create the amount you need.
3) Make a Google document and share the link in the Facebook group (make sure you set it to “All with Link can edit”).
4) Have everyone initial the ingredients that they will prepare at home. You can see below, we tried to do as much prep work at home to reduce chaos on the day-of.
5) Ask the shelter if there are any high need items so that the moms who can’t make it have a way to be involved. In our case, their high need items were socks and juice.
I involved my whole family in this project. Oma (my mom) donated her mac & cheese making skills and Opa (my dad) donated his bread making skills. And then my sister swooped in to save the day by keeping an eye on Edie so I could help get all the recipes coordinated. Also have to mention that one of the moms brought her sister who was such an amazing helper. It’s good to have some people without babies around! So in the end, we delivered 2 Veggie Bakes, 2 Chicken Pasta Bakes, 2 Mac & Cheese, 2 Apple Crisps, 20 loaves of homemade bread, 10 bottles of juice, cookies, chips, canned food, 8 lbs of popcorn, 4 bags of fruit, and lots of socks. GO MOMS!!! You rock!!
about the author Jordann Kearns — Jordann is a Registered Dietician turned blogger with a knack for photography. Keep up with Jordann on her blog, Intuitive Mama. Follow her on Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.
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