So, a few months back, we cooked up some burgers after a LAFF Softball game. It was a lot of fun and my loving husband takaza and I started to think about what we could accomplish if we really wanted to do it right.
Menu Preparation
First we had the entree: steak. No question about that. A local butcher had provided us with some outstanding steaks in the past, and though they were pricey, they were worth every penny. So, we had New York strip steaks at $13.99/pound; we decided that we could go with 8 oz. (225 g) steaks. Then came the side dishes: I wanted something green, and a starch. Grilled zucchini (courgettes) seemed a good choice – simple to prepare and cook. It needed a dressing, and I found one in a collection of recipes for cabbage salads – a tasty Asian peanut sauce. As for starches, a comment from atara put me on the trail of potatoes in foil. I elected to keep it simple and go with a simple combination of rosemary, garlic, and olive oil. To fill out the meal, a nice dinner roll would be good as well. I was puzzled for a dessert until I came across a recipe for “apple slab pie” in Cook’s Country Magazine – an apple pie made on a 13″ x 18″ half-sheet pan that purported to serve 18-20. Perfect! Now we had our menu in hand. After several trial runs (I’d never attempt an untried recipe for a crowd), we were ready to go. Working with softball organizer steviemaxwell we collected RSVP’s and used those project exactly how many people we’d be feeding (accounting for last-minute adds and drops). We came up with the magic number of 45. So 45 steaks were ordered two weeks before the cookout, and off we went!
Logistics
First, there was the question of the grill. The park grill we used in August was tiny – maybe 12 inches by 24 inches (30 cm x 60 cm), and awkward as heck to control the level of the grate. I checked around and found a rental company right near our house that would rent a nice 3 foot x 5 foot (90 cm x 1.5 m) charcoal grill for only $40 a day. Score! Next, I had to figure out what could be made in advance and what had to be made on-site. The steaks were easy – pick those up on Friday afternoon, keep chilled until grill time, coat with oil, salt, and pepper, and toss ’em on the grill.

The 22 pounds (10 kg) of zucchini could be peeled and cut on site, then coated with oil and grilled, then tossed with the Asian peanut sauce. This also had the benefit that it could be served at room temperature, so the zucchini could be grilled first, so if it cooled by serving time it was no big deal. The sauce could be made ahead of time and refrigerated; that was made on Thursday night. It took a bit more time than expected to peel and cut the zucchini, but I had a bit of slop in my schedule, so it was OK. Once the zucchini was off the grill and slightly cooled, I simply tossed it with the dressing and it was ready to go.

The potatoes were tricky; we were looking at about 30 pounds (13.7 kg) of potatoes. Preparing them on site was out of the questions since I only have one mandoline. I decided to cut them up Saturday morning using my Cuisinart (one potato took less than five seconds to slice!) and take a cue from keeping sliced apples from browning and dip the potatoes in acidulated water (4 Tablespoons lemon juice per gallon of water) before packing them into Cambro containers for transport.

The rolls were pretty straightforward, though it’s a bit of a jump to move from making one pan of a dozen rolls to making 96 rolls in eight pans. That took a bit of reworking of the recipe and borrowing of muffin pans from co-workers. Between the batter preparation and yeast rising times, it took about three and a half hours on Thursday night to bake up everything. In hindsight, the rolls were a little dry and were maybe not the best choice to accompany the meal. People seemed to mostly enjoy them though.

The apple pies (I made three of them) were by far the most time-consuming item, since each pie took seven pounds (3.2 kg) of apples. that was over 20 pounds (9 kg) of apples to be peeled, cored, and sliced. Fortunately, Takaza made quick work of them with a handy gadget we picked up for the occasion. Still, it took about five hours on Friday night to finish baking the pies, and we wrapped up close to midnight.

Finally, there was the general logistics. I will freely admit that I obsess about logistics, and my schedule of tasks was the source of much amusement on Saturday. However, my intention wasn’t to follow the schedule exactly so much as making sure that all tasks got completed in the proper order, and to tell when we were ahead or behind in schedule. Also, I found that while people are always willing to help, one of the biggest draws on a cook’s time is explaining tasks to people and managing them to provide the desired results. To that end I prepared detailed instructions so I could give people the recipe components and the printed instructions and not worry that things might go awry. That proved to work extremely well.
Execution
So how did it go? Amazingly well. We had a phenomenal amount of help from mirkowuff, daveqat, jimcyl, woodychitwn, little_wolf, bandrik and many others. The grill took some getting used to, but once we figured out how to best manage it, it worked superbly. That amount of charcoal gives off a blistering amount of heat – I was very glad we had brought welding gloves (part of my standard grilling kit)! Giving some thought to the fact that we would need to apply vegetable oil to both the zucchini and the steaks, I picked up some spray bottles at Sam’s Club; that worked so well we’re keeping the oil in the spray bottle at home for ease of use. We also had picked up a handy portable table that was so handy we may pick up another one. Finally, Sam’s Club provided an inexpensive 15-pack of disposable aluminum warming pans that were perfect for food preparation and serving.

In the end, all tasks were completed in order, on time. Food was served at exactly the designated time of 5:45 PM. Due to last-minute cancellations, no-shows, and such were able to provide steak to almost everyone who wanted one. We had plenty of leftover potatoes (25 lbs would have been sufficient, I think) and what seemed to be just enough zucchini. We had leftover apple pie, and wound up sending several folks home with platefuls of pie. As for the overall quality of the food? I haven’t heard any complaints, and a lot of raves 🙂 My personal observations: we forgot the salt on the potatoes (ack!) though we did provide salt at the serving table; I also found a few slightly undercooked potato slices, but generally they seemed OK. The rolls were a bit dry, as I mentioned. And some thought the pie was a bit too sweet, but that probably has more to do with my choice of apples (Golden Delicious and Cortland) than the amount of sugar in the pie. I am always my own worst critic, though, and everyone seemed happy.

Mission accomplished. And the big news? We’re doing it again! Saturday, July 19, 2008 at the LAFF Softball Ninth Anniversary Game and Dinner, at Belvidere Park in Waukegan, Illinois. It’ll be $10 per person, and be prepared to eat very, very well 🙂

Recipes to follow in my next post!
Crossposted to

Edit: I almost forgot – there’s pictures! Here’s pictures courtesy of dexcat, and also pictures by artemisfur.