Menu Change Please

September 2nd - 4th, 2014

Cooking, cooking and more yet to come.  The President is bringing the zones into Montevideo using the Carrasco chapel and the mission home (right next door) as base.  He is doing this instead of him traveling so far all the time.  The missionaries are so excited to do this because they will be allowed to attend the temple while they are here.  A zone usually consisits of 20 to 30 missionaries.
The schedule is as follows:
One zone will come in per day.
The zone gets split in half.  One group will attend the temple in the morning while the other group is attending a training in the chapel and being interviewed one by one by the President.  The training group will eat lunch at 12:30 and then they will attend the temple at 2 pm.  The other group will get back from the temple and eat lunch at 1:30 and then do their training and interviews.
The mission has 11 zones.  This week we had Melo and Este.
The financers Elder Taylor and Elder Galleano were in charge of feeding everyone when they came in and asked for our help in preparing and buying the food.

3 zones (1 per week) are coming in from a long distance. They need a light dinner the evening they arrive and they will stay the night in the temple block hotel. They also need breakfast and a sack lunch for their bus ride home after their conference.

All zones need lunch.

Their suggested menu was:

Desayunos: Yogur, Leche, Fruta, Cereal
This menu was easy enough except that we bought cocoa puffs, fruit loops, corn flakes, sugar corn flakes, Life, and granola.  The office elders were just going to buy cheerios and corn flakes. Those namebrand cereals do not exist down here but our Granero store has some good imitations.

 Cenas: Empanadas (3 per), alfajor (similar to a mud pie), frutas, botella de agua,
This menu was good too. We found a store that only has frozen food and got the empanadas at a good price.  We bought bananas and oranges. We served soda instead of buying bottled water.  The hotel had a water dispenser so that option to drink water was available.   I took out the alfahor and baked 3 cookies per person instead.



Sack Lunches: Premade sandwiches from the local market, alfahor, fruta, botella de agua.
YUCK!  Their sandwiches here are nothing.  They cut off all the crust, slap tons of mayo, wafer thin ham and cheese that you can't even taste it is so thin.

We changed to making the ham and cheese sandwiches ourselves with 2 per person and added a bag of chips.  The meat department will cut the ham whatever thickness you want.   Everything else stayed the same.

Almuerzos: Soda, alfahor, apples and bananas,

Milanesa (bought from local market already cooked) on some days, and pizza on other days.

I looked at this and said, NO WAY!

They eat pizza all the time and they eat milanesa all the time.

MENU CHANGE!   BBQ Hamburgers!   The mission home has a gas BBQ, so done deal. I didn't get any complaints.

What a HUGE hit this was.  

We did it all!  Mayo, mustard, ketchup, lettuce, onion, tomato, andmelted cheddar cheese. We even found some german pickles!  All we had to do was slice the pickles.
The only thing lacking was a bun with sesame seeds. We did have buns though.
We also served fruit cocktail with whipped cream which was eaten up especially by the sisters. More oranges were offered along with doritos and potato chips.  Sister Cook volunteered to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, 2 per person.  Soda was also served along with water.
Elder Burnett often would cook more knowing how much the elders can eat. Most elders would eat three hamburgers if they were available.

We have to do this for the next three weeks!  

But, oh what fun to see these hard working missionaries smile BIG!

Question of the week:  Que es pan de tortuga?