Vegetable Soup for the Lenten Soul

As do-gooders-practioners of a certain religion that celebrates their "Holy Months" this March & April, me and a group of Indonesian students volunteered to cook and serve the meatless soup this past Friday in the Activity Center of the institution.

The journey began with a discussion in the mi-list as to what kind of soup we are going to prepare, do we need a second "entree", who is available to help the actual cooking, etc. The group members were very enthusiastic about the occasion, reflected in the many opinion on the different kinds of soup that is easier or a bit tastier or somewhat cheaper to prepare. We ended up taking a vote, the results were, soup: macaroni-vegetables (carrot, potatoes, tomatoes, green bean), second "entree": gado-gado (Indonesian style salad with peanut sauce dressing).

As the status-quo-liason to the institution, I'm supposed to contact Mr. Scott, the one in charge for the whole activity. He was very grateful about our volunteering. Through the course of our conversation, he found out that we are going to use some nutmeg for the soup and was a bit thrilled. I found out a couple days later, that actually, everybody in the institution was thrilled with the nutmeg idea.

The day before the D-Day, I went shopping with Claudia in her nice light gold "new" Accord. Destinations: Farm Patch, a nice little fresh vegetables, fruits-and anything else produced from a farm-market, and the new HEB, for the processed ingredients.

I couldn't help with the cooking, since I had weekly group meeting with the research group. It is not a good practice to be not present in the meeting, unless one has somekind of life-threatening emergency. So after dropping the ingredients in the institution's industrial kitchen, and a last minute additional shopping plus a swing back to my apt for some brown sugar and pilancillo (that's Spanish for our "gula jawa"), I raced back to school for the meeting. I was a little bit worried that we didn't have enough time to serve everything at 7, it was already 3:30 PM when I left.

It was a success. In less than 2 hours, the troop of 8 with the command from Mas Niko and Linda completed the assignment. What an efficient work. So, we just need to arrange the food to be ready to be served.

7:01, there were already a long line (longer than the usual Friday) formed from the kitchen serving area to the outside door. We were surprised, and afraid that we wouldn't have have enough of those soup, much less the gado-gado. Everything is big in Texas, including the appetite.

7:30, still some line, by this time, they had to put 5 extra tables and couple chairs for the crowd. We were sure that we won't have enough soup. Err..actually we had, for the first round. But there were people coming back for the 2, 3, 4 rounds...yeah, our soup was that good.

8:00, gado-gado was gone. Most of the group member were not even had a chance to eat it. Poor Nadeth and her craving.

So, the volunteering was a success. We even had people coming to the kitchen and start some kind of light cheerleading activity. What a nice day.

As a summary,
Gallon of soup made: 5
Total head count of people eating the soup: 80
Recovering our reputation back from the choir fiasco: priceless