As If I Needed Something Else to Fret About

Since exams and papers have long been turned in, I now have something new to fret about in my dreams...whether or not I've put enough butter in the lima bean/asparagus casserole. If you're not familiar with this dish, it was a holiday staple growing up in my family. Cook some lima beans, throw in some fresh or canned asparagus, add a can of cream of asparagus soup, top with cashew nuts and bake until bubbly. It's a delicious dish even if it doesn't sound that way on paper, I mean on screen. I haven't fixed it this year as we went out for Thanksgiving and Christmas has yet to arrive. But it made an appearance in my dream last night as the kitchen cast prepared a meal at Chapel Hill's Community Kitchen on Rosemary Street.

In real life, I got an e-mail from my church asking if I could help prepare and/or serve the lunch meal at the Community Kitchen on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I was already going to take some time off to go to Grace's program at school so I thought, what the heck, it's something I've always wanted to do, so why not.

I got there about 9:30 AM for all the cooking and prep required to get a meal ready for 100 people by 11:30 AM. There was fruit to cut up, meat to cook, side dishes to bake, bread to cut up and my job? To dole out 100 individual pieces of dessert (cake, cupcakes, cookies, pies, etc). The kitchen scene reminded me of the kitchen at camp where I worked for two summers but with real adults doing the fixing, not kids out of college for the summer. It was one of those times where I walked into the unknown, to a well-oiled machine with a head staff person leading the volunteers and a head volunteer leading all of us. I was the new person that wanted to jump in and start getting desserts ready without having to ask a lot of questions, but there were a lot of questions to ask. Where were the desserts? Where would I actually do my work? Where would I put the hundred servings of dessert? Where were the knives, etc? I tried to learn quickly and stay out of everyone else's way...especially the ones with the sharpest knives.

I found the cooler with all the Harris Teeter cakes and pies and cookies, and the homemade stuff too, and the rule was, if I wouldn't eat it, then I shouldn't put it out to serve. I checked expiration dates on marble cream cakes and made my own judgements about whether to put out the puff pastries again. I found out that putting cupcakes on napkins was easier and less messy than cutting into cherry and blueberry pies. I found that my job invloved a bit of quality control as in how would I know if the pumpkin cheesecake was fit to serve the Community Kitchen guests if I didn't sample a bite first? My colleagues agreed. There was a lot of sampling going on. I learned that I wasn't the newest one by walking up to a middle-aged man to ask him, since he's been doing this longer than I have, if he thought one day past the printed expiration date would be ok. He said that he'd been there a total of twenty minutes longer than I had and that my guess was as good as his.

I learned that once everyone got into a groove with their jobs and had been working for about an hour, that the conversation moved more from "Do we need any more apples in this fruit salad?" to "Have you seen the new UNC basketball uniforms? They look good on the players!" Which led to middle-aged church women going ga ga over how Tyler Hansbrough looks in a jersey and shorts which led to one of them exclaming, "Ladies, we're old enough to be his mother!" Which lead me to exclaim, "I'm old enough to be his mother!" Which led to a moment of pause.

I got all of the 100 dessert pieces ready to be served but had to leave before the serving actually began. I had a great time working with that team in such a tangible way. I thought we were preparing a holiday meal, but we weren't. This is what they do every single day for people who live at the shelter and even people who come in to eat lunch for a wholesome, tasty, free meal. Afterall, lots of attention is put on having a meat, vegetable, starch, and dessert at every meal. That's more than I can say my family gets.

So to my dream...I was back in the Community Kitchen, this time working on a vegetable side dish, the lima bean casserole, when one of the team members (a man, not a woman) looked around funny when I was ready to serve it up. He apparently did a "quality control taste" and it didn't pass. I was crushed because I had followed the directions, I'd thought. Then I realized I'd only put 1 tablespoon of butter in instead of 1 stick of butter. We had to throw the whole thing out because we couldn't serve anything we wouldn't eat ourselves.

I guess I have food on the brain due to my restricted diet. The closest thing I've come to eating dessert or anything sweet is last night when I sliced up a few sweet potatoes, put them on a baking sheet, drizzled extra virgin olive oil on them then sprinkled generously with salt and pepper and baked at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. They were good. Even Johnny thought they were yum.