HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

COFFEE ..... I NEED COFFEE!!!    I must be getting too old for this stuff.  I can pretty much tell you where every muscle in my body is and what I used it for yesterday.  Even my EARS hurt!!!

I tried to fortify myself with some amazing butterscotch marshmallow fudge before heading out to the Elks Lodge at 5:30 am.  Even if I ate the whole pan, it probably would not have been enough.  This recipe though ... 1/2 stick butter, one package butterscotch chips and one cup of peanut butter poured over marshmallows ... couldn't be easier to fix.  I love butterscotch, but next time I'll use milk chocolate chips and half the butter.

Here's my sweet boy letting me know he's not happy.  He's so funny ... if he doesn't get his ball to play with ... or the treat he wants ... he goes and hides and just waits.  Pretty soon I realize he's gone and go looking.  He jumps up and runs to the counter.  Sometimes he will even sneak around behind me so I can't find him, whereupon I start yelling his name, thinking he got outside.  Yeah ... he's real funny!!!!

Happy Father's Day to all the dads, granddads and great granddads out there.  The Elks Lodge celebrates our Dads by having a brunch absolutely free for them and every member of their family.  This time it was pancakes, sausage, fruit, scrambled eggs and biscuits with gravy.  We make a mean sausage gravy that's even better than I can make.  

The problem lay in the fact that no one checked the calendar.  They scheduled a big Hawaiian Luau party on Saturday night.  That meant we couldn't do anything ahead of time to get ready, thus the early morning arrival.  It had us scrambling to get everything set up to feed the estimated 300 people.

The good news was we had 14 bags of scrambled eggs to cook.  No cracking required.  The bad news was we needed 28 bags of eggs.  That meant I was back to cooking them in big pans in the ovens.  Oh my poor burned fingers.  

It didn't help that our order of food was not made correctly, and in the first hour we had to send someone running to the store after 30 more pounds of sausage.  Yessirree ... I ran 50 pounds of sausage links through those ovens in two hours and every bit of it disappeared.  

Herein lies the problem ... when you serve 8 things, people take smaller portions and the food lasts longer. When you only serve 4 things, they take more and you run out.  The next trip to the store was for pancake batter.  We ran through that 30 pounds of Krusteaz mix in the first 60 minutes.  There was another mad dash to the store. 

By the way ... best pancake cooker EVER!!  They were perfect and he cooked them all on this flattop.

Lesson learned ... when you shorten the menu, people eat more of the food you have and you have to cook twice as fast!!  I was flinging screaming hot pans around the kitchen like a mad woman!!

Three hours later we had served about 325 people.  Whew!!  What a morning ... and we were all exceedingly happy to shut down at 11:30.  We had biscuits and gravy leftover, so I panned it all up and we took it to the Homeless Shelter across town.  

It was a good day, but boy am I paying for it this morning.  I think Cooper and I will take a nice long walk to work the kinks out of my muscles ... after my second cup of coffee!!