OA Conclave food ideas

[kahits]

I have a group of youth arrowmen who have committed to being host chapter for next years Spring OA Conclave. I would love to get some ideas on cooking for the lodge, as it relates to what you may have seen at some of your OA conclaves. This will be the largest gathering of the lodge, and will be over 200 arrowmen at the gathering.

[moxieman]

kahits,

 

Who does the cooking for you at your ordeals/work weekends and what do they cook? Do you/the youth like what they cook? That would be a good starting point.

 

I'm on our lodge's cook crew. We use a few different "standard" menus for the ordeals.

 

Fri. evening cracker barrel: homemade pizza

 

Sat. Breakfast is either french toast/sausage or pancakes/sausage, fresh fruit salad

Sat. Lunch is make your own subs and chocolate chip cookies

 

Sat. Dinner 1: Pork Roast, mashed potatoes, homemade yeast rolls, veg, salad.

 

Sat. Dinner 2: Lasagna, homemade garlic bread, salad.

 

Sat. Dinner 3: Turkey (fried in outdoor cookers), mashed potatoes, veg., salad, homemade yeast rolls.

 

Sat crackerbarrel: Ice cream sundaes and any leftovers from the day.

 

Sun breakfast: assorted homemade coffee cakes (easy--we use institutional-size boxes of muffin mix spread in full sheet pans, topped with blueberries, chocolate chips, apple pie filling or pumpkin pie filling depending on the season. We do three flavors. Fresh Fruit Salad.

 

 

Our youth chose a mix/match of those and some other stuff for the conclave we hosted a year ago:

 

Fri eve crackerbarrel: homemade pizza, cookies and popcorn

 

Sat morn: Pancakes, sausage, fruit salad, yogurt, cereal, and oatmeal.

 

Sat lunch: Pulled-pork sandwiches

 

Sat Dinner: Shoot...can't recall now. We might have done roast beef with mashed potatoes. There was also veg, salad and yeast rolls.

 

Sat crackerbarrel: sundaes, "Sea Dog Biscuits" (local minor league baseball team is the Sea Dogs. Sea Dog Biscuits are ice cream sandwiches where the "bread" is chocolate chip cookies. As Madockawanda Lodge's "official" lodge color is purple, we ordered raspberry chocolate chip ice cream--deep purple in color--as the ice cream filling in the dog biscuits.) More popcorn, cheese, crackers, pretzels, other snack foods.

 

Sun breakfast: coffee cakes, yogurt, fruit salad, and any leftovers from the weekend that anyone wanted. I think we took the leftover mashed potatoes, threw them on the grill, added some cajun spice blend to'em and served'em up as hash browns.

 

Of course, we had a vegetarian option at all meals.

 

Our core ordeal kitchen crew consists of 3 or 4 individuals and another half-dozen or so "part timers" (can put a few hours here or there). Others jump in after meals to help with dishes.

 

For the Conclave, or core kitchen crew consisted of about 8 with nearly as many "part timers" and again, others who jumped in after meals to help with dishes.

 

Council made one mistake for conclave. They put in a new coffee dispensing machine in the dining hall and did not provide us a way to open it (locked) to refill it. Then again, we didn't have anything to refill it with. The machine ran out of coffee at about 6am on Sun morn. Fortunately, we found an old drip machine and we had enough grounds on hand to cover the rest of the morning. Council ranger was surprised we went through that much coffee--vendor claimed it should have lasted the whole weekend and then some. Said machine was not there this spring and we had our commercial drips back. 'nuf said.

 

If you have just the commercial drip coffee makers, you'll need someone assigned to just keep those things going throughout breakfast both mornings.