Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser!! (4/17/11)

Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to help with a spaghetti dinner fundraiser to raise money for the Eastern Illinois Food Bank. I was excited for the night to finally arrive because Susan, her college interns, and I had been planning it for a couple months and working hard to get everything organized! The dinner was from 5-7PM, but I had to arrive at 3:30PM to start cooking food. When I first arrived, Kelsey (intern) was making a giant pan of brownies, and there were several other desserts displayed on the counter, to which I added a couple bags of homemade cookies I had prepared the night before (D). Her interns, sister, and daughter were preparing salad, cutting bread, and making lemonade. Susan had 4 giant pots of water beginning to boil on the stove. While I was waiting for water to boil, I had to open tons of jars of pasta sauce, season them, and pour them into crockpots to simmer. Then, when the water was boiling, I was put in charge of cooking the pasta-LOTS and LOTS of pasta-I have never cooked that much at once in my life before!! At first I was a little overwhelmed, but after I got going, I got into a routine. We ended up filling 5 gigantic metal pans completely full of pasta. One thing I learned was the importance of pouring olive oil onto the pasta if it is going to be sitting around for awhile-otherwise it sticks together terribly and is very difficult to serve to people (we found that out the hard way :/ ) From 5-7PM we served dinner to many people and were able to raise close to $1000 for the food bank, which is awesome! I felt so satisfied because I knew all our hard work was worth it in the end. Though scrubbing the pasta sauce pots was not so much fun (the sauce had burnt to the bottoms of the pans), I think that the dinner was very successful, and I am happy that along with feeding a great meal to many people, we also were able to help the food bank!