Dinner for a hundred? No problem.

This week I created a dinner with a “mystery” theme for about 100 youth from church. The dinner was part of “Camp Clue” with a cast of eleven silly mystery characters who would be the basis for the theme meal. When creating this meal, I tried to do three things: 1) Incorporate the mystery characters into the meal; 2) Stay under budget at three dollars per person; and 3) Sneak veggies into the meal while using incredibly flavorful ingredients so that the teenagers would enjoy it!

It took 4 volunteers a little over two hours to prepare the meal, and 7 volunteers to efficiently plate the food in a timely manner. I was pretty happy with the food we actually cooked, and the feedback from both teenagers and adults was wonderful.

For this blog, I am going to write briefly about the items that we actually created and cooked ourselves. (For example, we used gross Costco rolls… If I had been more ambitious and had more time, I would have served homemade rolls, but not for a hundred people!)

Pasta: We cooked penne pasta and tossed it with plenty of parmesan and a homemade sauce – super simple combination of tomato sauce, salt, pepper, honey, and crushed red pepper flakes. We roasted fresh zucchini with chopped garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Then we tossed the zucchini into the pasta. What a sneaky way for kids to eat their veggies! The garlic and oil from roasting also gave extra flavor to the pasta, and the smell was delicious!


Salad: We used a combination of romaine and spinach. As long as there was some romaine, most of the kids would eat all of the lettuce and would not even notice that they were eating spinach. Plus, we used plenty of parmesan cheese and splurged on Annie’s Green Goddess dressing (amazing). The salad was topped with cubed cherry tomatoes and had a couple of snack size carrots on the side.

Potatoes: At camp, kids usually get fed potatoes from a box (more expensive and less healthful than real mashed potatoes). Thankfully, there were enough volunteers willing to peel, chop, cook, and mash about 30 pounds of potatoes. When we mashed the potatoes, we used plenty of real butter, whipping cream, salt, pepper, and fresh thyme! We could have made more potatoes – many teenagers asked for seconds!

All in all, I think the dinner was a huge success (thanks to the volunteers who actually cooked and served the meal with me). I would happily do this occasionally for the church, but I will not be starting a catering company any time soon – haha!