Cooking

So how DO you cook for 40 people at a month long course—three meals a day-seven days a week?

Well here are photos of our “stovetop” and “oven.” Both are fire driven. We have a duty roster which schedules the men to take turns chopping firewood each day.

We have three ladies that do our cooking for us and they are wonderful! They arrive at 5:30 each morning to get the fire going to heat water for coffee and tea for breakfast—and they stick around all day (with short lull between breakfast & lunch and lunch & dinner) until dinner is cleaned up.

I have made up a menu of what I would like cooked for each meal, I just try to make sure that we have all the ingredients (all that are available this week at least!) and the cooks do an excellent job of handling all the actual cooking. This is really great for me, as they have SOO much more experience cooking over fires and inside a wood oven that I wouldn’t be much help anyways. In fact I just learned last week that because the oven gets so smoky when there is an actual fire under it, they have to start early and get a good fire going so that they will have only coals before cooking inside or the food will taste smoky. This makes sense, but I don’t think I would have thought of it on my own!

We have been trying a few new recipes this course (potato soup, chili, tuna & egg salad sandwiches, coffee cake, brownies) and they have been so excited for the opportunity to test new things! I am so thankful for these three women!!