Accomplished

I can cross a couple things off my life-to-do list now. One is coordinate (and mostly make) a meal for a large group. The other is determine if I'll be able to handle a group of teenagers.

I succeeded at both. 24 servings of chicken and mixed veggies (with tons of chili and garlic powder and a bit of butter) and homemade mashed potatoes with cheese and globs of butter and garlic powder and pepper. I have an overflowing bowl of delicious leftovers in my fridge. Fruits of my labor.

See, I volunteer 7 hours a week at an afterschool program for all grade levels. It's kinda for a teaching class, but I'm going waaaay beyond the call of duty regarding hours here. It's not in the nicest area of Columbia, so we provide one decent meal for these kids. Usually there are at least 4 staff members there, but today there were only 3 of them. And the one who was supposed to cook didn't show up. We usually serve dinner at 5. At 4:50, we figured out this person wasn't coming in. So a staff member, Ms. M (we call everyone Ms. or Mr. at this place), and myself started cooking. But Ms. M doesn't like to cook and we couldn't find the meal sheet (which tells us what to cook) and on top of all that, she had to leave at 5:30. So we pull out potatoes and mixed veggies. I start scrubbing away at potatoes, she cooks veggies. Then we search for a protein. There's chicken. We fed them chicken already this week. There's pork. Who knows how to cook pork? Ground meat. They did that just yesterday. Chicken it is. We'll put some new spices on it. Perfect. Throw it in the oven and heat it up. It's pre-cooked, right?

No. Of course not. So while we're worrying about non-cooked chicken and cutting up the potatoes and getting the dang water to boil so we can cook them and somehow bring non shredable American cheese (not exactly sure why we felt we needed to shred the cheese) into the whole mix, Ms. M finds the original list. Shepherd's pie with carrots. Doesn't Shepherd's pie already have carrots in it? Do we have time to cook the stuff into pies? We're already going with this...thing. Shepherd's pie can be another time. Speaking of time, she's outie. And I'm in charge. It's just my second week. And I have a group of 5 teenagers throwing floppy cheese bits at each other in the middle of my kitchen.

So we get to work. One girl watches the veggies, one girl watches the chicken, the boys wash and chop potatoes and somehow will the water to boil and cook them and then drain and mash them. Did I mention I have a habit of taking over when people try to cook? It happens to me a lot. I don't mean to. But I end up just doing everything, even though I assign people to do stuff. So that veggies girl ends up setting out plates, the chicken girl ends up cutting chicken and pouring milk with one of the boys, a girl who is part of the program helps me with the mashing and mixing (and tossing cheese in?) of potatoes and before I know it, we're plating. And this time I give everyone a job and I let them stick to it.

And they all listened! Now, granted this was a group of volunteers so they're willing to help and take direction, but they hadn't been alerted that I was put in charge. And they've all been helping out longer than I have. And more often. But they respected my authority and it helped things go smoothly. And a lot of them complimented me on what I made and how I ran things after the fact. It was really awesome.

And even beyond that, more kids in the program are calling me by my name and the staff members are chatting with me, asking how my day went, and we're learning about each other and I'm helping kids learn what verbs are vs. nouns and it's all just really good stuff. I'm making a difference and that's something that was lacking in my former career path.