120 Are Coming for Lunch

It was during the SRF years, when our children were pre-schoolers and our intentions were honorable. I’m not naming names here, but my sister-in-law whose name starts with S, though my junior by several years, always came to my rescue when I called for help. Help was needed when I was told that my husband’s church/temple was hosting a seminar that included lunch and I had been volunteered by him to prepare a meal for 120 vegetarians who needed to be fed and watered during a 30-minute break. Why didn’t I laugh in his face, I ask myself today? I have no answer for that question. What I did instead was run to S for help and suggestions. The first obstacle was that neither one of us were vegetarians. Oh, I pretended to be one for the ten odd years when that regimen was enforced on the household. But the reputation of the church/temple was riding on this seminar and the lunch fare had to rise above peanut butter on whole wheat sandwiches. So we invented a menu. Some manufacturer or other made little pretend hotdogs out of soybeans and sold them in cans. We would cut up the pretend hotdogs, float them in some sort of barbecue sauce and call it the main dish. After all, if our families could survive for years on diced hotdogs, so could our guests. I’m certain we served something on which to pour the soydogs-in-sauce. Perhaps it was rice. Rice sounds reasonable and suitable for lunch in a quasi-Indian church/temple courtyard. Let’s pretend it was rice. The biggest impression left in my memory bank was the coleslaw. Instead of salad, like any sane restaurateur would serve, we decided to serve coleslaw. Grocery shopping was easy. Purchase all the cans of soybean hotdogs in the neighboring health food stores. Twenty-thirty cans, I can’t remember. What I do remember was I only brought one can opener on lunch day. This means the slave assigned to hotdogs strained her wrist opening slippery, slimy cans of soydogs, pouring the liquid down the drain, and dumping the contents into a huge bowl. Another slave would pick up one dog at a time, cut the dogs but not her thumb, and let the pieces fall into the largest pans we had, six or seven of them, then dump endless bottles of barbecue sauce into the pans, and simmer them over the church/temple stove. I think both these slaves were me. The other slaves were a coworker who lacked the sense to say no to my plea, and one or two sweet helpers who donated sweat and maybe some blood and were probably not thanked for their service. If you were one and you’re reading this and I’m not mentioning you, I offer my heartiest apologies. All I can recall is the hotdogs, the coleslaw, and the flies. If we cooked rice, it also was on the stove. Fruit. No doubt we cut up barrels of fruit. Vegetarians eat a lot of fruit. I’m going to talk to S tomorrow to see if she has any recurring nightmares about what else we dished out on the serving lines. Once we learned we had to feed 120 in 20 minutes, we realized one serving line would take too long so we set up four tables. Help yourself to a paper plate and soydogs. Of course, that involved shopping for tablecloths, paper goods, and plastic cups for the carafes of whatever liquid we served. Lemonade and water? That sounds rational. Frozen lemonade and water in all the pitchers the entire extended family owned. So back to the coleslaw. Here was the plan: I would bring my food processor and we would shred on site. Jars of mayonnaise and bottles of vinegar and bags of sugar were procured. Then we went in search of cabbage. We found it at our favorite local grocery store. Taking an uneducated guess, we computed a need for fifteen heads of cabbage. After all, this was just a side dish. Do you know, you can’t actually fit fifteen fat cabbage heads into one standard size shopping cart? We filled up one-and-a-half and headed to the checkout stand. Waiting in line, we heard this loud complaint: “Hey, ladies! Could you have the decency to leave at least one head of cabbage for the rest of us?” This echoed through the store, turning all heads toward our carts. Then we spotted the attacker. Our best friend. Said friend proceeded to ram her cart into ours in an effort to get past us in line. Then, as we realized the checkout lady was reaching for her phone, we babbled that this was all in fun and there was no need to call for security. She relented but still gave us dirty looks. It’s hard to roll fifteen cabbages into bags. Back to the church/temple kitchen. It’s the day of reckoning. The slaves start preparations hours before noon. The food processor is doing its best; it later dies of cabbage fatigue. Bowls full of coleslaw mayo are being whipped into obedience. But where do you mix up coleslaw for 120 if you don’t have industrial sized equipment? That’s easy. What are the biggest plastic containers we owned? Our babies’ bathtubs. Yes, I filled up one pink and one blue baby bathtub with shaved slaw, mayo goop, and peanuts and tossed it with my hands. (Yes, I washed the bathtubs thoroughly before and after. No one was the wiser. The other slaves in the kitchen never squealed. Where was S? Home, watching the babies.) Once four hours of prepping was completed, we piled bowls with food and serving utensils and made sure all four tables had equal amounts of whatever we’d created. I remember distinctly the sneers on the faces of several guests, the looks of disapproval and disappointment. Lunch was not up to their expectations. Also, there were complaints about how long it took to be served. Thirty people lined up per table, evaluating the edibles in front of them, hesitating and then relenting to a spoonful. It took twenty minutes per table which left them 10 minutes to eat. Lunch was not a success. However, the flies and the bees thought it was the garden of Eden. They had a feast. It was after all an outdoor event. I forgot to bring fly swatters or fan bearers. Worst of all, the poor coworker who was just there as a gesture of good will got stung by one of the bees. Of course, she was allergic to bee stings and we had to take her to the emergency room after we packed up all our pots, pans, utensils, and bathtubs. She got a shot of something very strong and I brought her home with me to sleep it off on our fold-out couch bed. No one was expecting to a sleepover but you gotta do what you gotta do. Once I saw she was safely snoring, I resorted to my own medicine. Was it scotch? Codeine? Leftover Valium? Something of that order. It had been a rough week of hard planning, much shopping, exhausting preparations, and very little thanks. My reward was a very sound drug-induced sleep. Never think this is a sad story, though. Quite the contrary. In spite of the ungrateful attendees, we have many happy memories. Being humiliated in the grocery store. What it takes to kill a food processor. The eternally captured scent of cold soydog slime water. Best of all, the knowledge that it’s amazing what you can pull off when you’re trying to be cooperative. Baby bathtub mixing bowls. Who knew?