Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

• Check in Wednesday night so as to have all day Thursday in town to do the shopping and prep.
  
• Get a room to use as pantry-kitchen that's not the one I'm sleeping in. I usually get two beds; if we use a hotel room, one with just one bed would give us more room to work in.
  
• Estimate quantities better.
  
• Spend more, especially on drinks.
  
• Make salsa from fresh ingredients. A typical recipe for salsa will make a gallon or so per batch, which is the sort of quantity that would be good.
  
• Recruit three crews. At least one or two helpers per crew. Daytime prep, for two or three hours in the afternoon. The hour before and an hour or two into the party. Teardown, including dishwashing arrangements.
  
• Buy more extra snacks for the random "con suite" crowd.
  
• Have a mechanism in place for counting visitors, with or without badge. I.e. party stickers; ribbons won't do if badges are optional.
  
• Skip the pitchers of drinks, unless they can be made more prominent, e.g. large urns.

Preliminary notes: We gave away 264 stickers to people coming through the door. Typically the line outside the door was about 22 people deep, it didn't extend all the way to the end of the hall.

9 o'clock meats were: Carnitas* (shredded pork), "Shredded" chicken (a recipe that needs to go in for re-tooling), and Tex Mex Shredded beef*. (*= recipe available.) We ran out of those a little before 10 o'clock, and because we didn't have any rice you couldn't even enjoy some sauce-soaked rice.

10 o'clock we put out: BBQ Pulled Pork (which was just a jar of sauce and a crockpot of meat), Chicken Mole (which was a Mole Poblano sauce and the cut-up chicken breast meat), and Ground Beef (using the Trader Joe's Taco Seasoning mix).

11 o'clock, we brought out the Spicy Pork with Peanut Sauce*, and the Teriyaki Chicken (which was meat with the Kikkoman Teriyaki Sauce & Merinade). We ended at midnight with half a spoonful of chicken left.

We had tortillas and taco shells for 208 tacos but I know we had some losses due to breakage, we ran out of them between 10 and 11 I think; rice ran out by about 10 o'clock because we only had one batch. We had can-opener failure so we didn't re-stock the beans which ran out quickly, should have had a larger crockpot. We also should have had a larger crockpot for the Soyrizo so we could have started with all 36 oz. (In general, re-filling a crockpot is problematical.)

Cheese/nacho dips didn't work out well, next time we should just get a #10 can of nacho cheese sauce and try that.

The freeze-dried jalapeños were a surprise hit. We should have cut up 8 limes, not 4, and the oranges should have been just cut into quarters to make them obviously a side snack and not a garnish. I forgot to unpack the tomato and the cilantro, perhaps I should provide a checklist for the prep crew? We had other garnishes and toppings; the guacamole was quite a hit.

Simplified menu for next time: Instead of three kinds of pork, we'll just have plenty of Carnitas. The ground beef and the shredded beef are both tasty, so I might keep both of those; the Chicken Mole is a really big hit and dead easy. So for prep, I can pre-mix the two batches of spices, bring the commercial spice mix and the cans and boxes of pre-made sauces, tomatos and so forth. Forget the two kinds of cheese sauce, one thing of nacho cheese is fine (and it makes a huge amount).

The two packages of cut-up lettuce/salad mix were enough, likewise one bag of shredded carrots. 4 cans of Trader Joe's Cuban Black Beans may not be enough, suggest bumping up the crockpot size to at least Medium Round 3.5 qt and filling it with 6 cans. 3 Soyrizo may be enough, we should bring something to clean up spilled soy chorizo from the floor (and maybe a hand vac too).

Rice cooker+crockpot is more work than deploying two rice cookers, so we should just borrow a second rice cooker.

We had four or five guacamole packages and probably could have used more; either use a bigger serving bowl, or just put out the plastic containers and let people serve themselves directly from them.


There are probably never going to be enough Moon Pies, but we could have had two or three boxes. If we do something like this 9-12 thing, perhaps announce that we'll be closed for five minutes at 9:55 and 10:55 to do a little refreshing? And buy triple of certain items.

Label the donation jar "TIPS."

• Seasoned ground beef, just shy of 6 lbs. worth. Made with the Trader Joe's taco seasoning and tomato sauces.
  
• Chili Colorado (beef), bought about 6 lbs of meat.
  
• Carnitas (shredded pork), bought 5.8 lbs of meat.
  
• Chicken Mole, used 3 whole chickens from Costco's rotisserie. missmea was kind enough to pull most of the meat off of the bones for us. That went into a crockpot with three boxes of Rogelio Bueno's Mole Poblano.
  
• Soy Chorizo, 24 oz., from Trader Joe's.

• Taco shells, Taco Bell brand (because they were on sale, $1.99/12.)
  
• Soft taco size flour tortillas.
  
• Street taco size corn tortillas, in a crockpot to warm them up (and as it turns out, overcook most of them).
  
• Regular steamed white rice
  
• Cuban-style black beans (from Trader Joe's, 4 or 5 cans I think)
  
• Chopped lettuce
  
• Chopped red onion
  
• 2 lbs. shredded cheese - the "Mexican blend" from Stater Bros. I couldn't find any cheddar cheaper, so it made no sense to grate it myself.
  
• 16 oz. sour cream
  
• 4 limes, cut into 10 wedges each. (Thank you again, Maria!)
  
• 10 bottles of Coca-Cola from Mexico, made with real sugar
  
• Pint and half-pint bottled water, donated from my last picnic's leftovers