Catering Flashback

When I was in college I started a catering business that I kept running for ten years after college.  My late college roommate Lauren Roberts, who went on to Coke as the first woman VP of advertising, brilliantly named my business “á La Carter,” the play on the word cater since my last name was Carter.  Catering was my side business to my main gig of hawking mail opening and extracting machines.

My friends used to ask me why I did not quit my real job and just do catering since they clearly thought it was a more glamorous job and they liked the leftovers.  I had two reasons.  The money in the mail opening business was too easy to give up and catering was physically exhausting.

Today, twenty years after I gave up catering, my body had flashbacks of my catering days.  My daughter Carter is riding in the State Fair Horse Show this weekend and somehow I was given the task of providing all the meals for the riders and their families for the three-day events.

It is a crazy week so I only had this afternoon to prepare three main dishes for 30 plus people for lunch and dinner each day.  The real kicker is that the meals have to be fully cooked so that I can reheat them in a brigade of Crock-pots in a horse stall turned food service area.

I chopped 15 pounds of onions, five heads of garlic, 5 pounds of carrots, 10 peppers from my garden and 20 pounds of chicken.  I browned ground meat, opened endless cans of beans, and stirred giant pots boiling away on the stove.  After 6 hours I had enough Ham and Black Bean soup, Chicken Chili and Spaghetti Casserole to keep the giant brigade of horse crazy girls, their bored brothers and exhausted parents fed all weekend.

Beside the pain my in back the most familiar catering feeling was one of lack of hunger from cooking such large amounts of food.  I had forgotten how cooking so much in such a short period of time completely made me lose my appetite.  My thought now is that if my back could hold out I should go back to catering just until I reach an ideal weight.

If you are crazy enough to visit the North Carolina State Fair this weekend and tire of looking at the ride operators who are missing their important teeth or eating deep fried butter, stop on by the Jim Graham building and watch the horse show.  They have chairs where you can sit a spell and if you find me I might have a nice bowl of soup for you.