Serving Bar-B-Q Dinners

We used to cook and serve bar-b-q dinners for different civic organizations when I was a girl.  Our Bishop, Dilworth Brinton, was very involved in civic affairs, and came up with the idea of the youth of our ward preparing and serving these dinners as a way to raise funds for youth activities.  It was a good idea.

Usually we served bar-b-q chicken.  The men and boys would cook the chicken over huge bar-b-q grills, basting it with melted butter and seasonings until the skin crackled and melted in your mouth and the meat was juicy and savory.  The women and girls would prepare dutch oven biscuits which we dipped in melted butter, arranged in pie pans, then left in the back of Bishop's station wagon to raise.  When they were puffed up we would put them in dutch ovens, then the boys would use the coals from the bar-b-q to cover the dutch ovens and cook them until they were light brown and fluffy.  Oooooohhhhh, they were good.  For desert we used the same biscuits but arranged them over melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and chopped nuts.  When they were cooked we'd flip them over onto a plate, and they were the most delicious sweet rolls!

Beside chicken and rolls we usually served baked potatoes which we rolled in tin foil, and fruit salad made by cutting up bananas into fruit cocktail, then mixing with fresh whipped cream.  Everyone raved about those dinners.

We all worked together to put a dinner on.  It was a lot of work to bring and set up enough long tables and chairs for all the guests.  Often we would be serving more than a hundred people.  We had to roll butcher paper onto the tables and tape it down at the ends.  The younger girls job was to roll plastic spoons, forks, and knives in napkins, then place them on the tables in front of each chair.  After the food was cooked we served it from a long serving table, then we had to walk around while the guests ate, refilling water glasses.  When everyone was done we cleaned off and took down the tables, washed the dishes, and cleaned everything up.  It was a lot of work and we usually weren't done until late in the evening, but it was fun.

Not only did we earn a lot of money for our super activities, we learned a lot, too.  The boys learned how to cook over a fire, we girls learned how to make rolls and be waitresses, but most of all we all learned how to work together.  It gave us teenagers a chance to work side by side with adults, laughing, swapping stories, and discovering that they were fun, cool people.  A lot of friendships were formed serving those dinners.

Twice we had the opportunity to prepare Passover dinners for a Jewish congregation in our community.  Those were really amazing.  We served mostly the same menu, with a few additions.  There was a special fruit salad they asked us to make, made from cut up apples and nuts and raisins, if I remember right, mixed with wine.  Since we don't drink alcohol in our church that was kind of a problem.  Dad asked mom if she would make that salad so no one else had to be bothered.  She had to go to the local grocery store and buy the wine, which was embarrassing enough, and then mix up the salad in our kitchen.  I still remember how awful that smelled (maybe it was cheap wine or something, but it cured me of ever thinking wine sounded good because it smelled disgusting!).  Dad had to find someone else to make the salad the second year we put on that dinner.  What was really cool was being on hand to watch the Passover celebration once the people had been served.  The dinner was held outside, at a park on South Mountain, and it was really cool to listen as the rabbi talked, the setting sun turning orange behind the western mountains.  It was an awesome evening.