I Wish I Had a Me

Posted: August 16, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: | Leave a comment

 

 

In college I started a catering business.  It happened kind of by accident.  The summer I lived in Carlisle I worked in the catering office of the college.  Since the Washington Redskins had their summer training camp at Dickinson all their meals were considered special and ran through my office.  Then a professor’s wife who was my friend asked if I could help her cater another Professors daughter’s wedding and do all the cooking with her.  By in the early eighties there were just not a lot of good food choices in Central Pennsylvania and the bride was not interested in having steamship round of beef.

 

Once I got out of college and had a real job in Washington DC I thought I might as well keep catering since it was easy money.  Feeding people and throwing parties was always one of my favorite activities.  Since it was my side business I did not have a commercial kitchen or any major overhead, thus my prices were dramatically lower than the big time Washington caterers.

 

Over time I developed a nice group of clients who were mainly middle-aged women who loved to have parties but did not want to do all the work themselves, or quite frankly none of the work themselves.  Typically I would get a call from one of them asking if I could do their party, they might have a theme, they would give me the number of people of coming and the date then really leave everything else up to me.

 

I would get to decide on the menu and just show up with the food, the drinks, the staff and the equipment.  My client would be a lady of leisure the day of her party and get to act more of a guest.  At the end of the evening, we would clean up and haul everything out and her house would look as if no one had been there, except for the leftover food that would fill her refrigerator.  Before I left she would write me a check and we were done.

 

I am now the age of those women.  I look back on how easy it was for my clients.  I would kill to have a young, great caterer who was cheep as dirt, who brought doctors and lawyers as wait staff, who I trusted to take care of everything, make interesting and yummy food and leave the house spotless.

 

Of course I know wonderful caterers now, but they are real businesses.  Having them do my parties is easy, but I pay for it.  I also still like to cook some things myself and that does not always suit caterers.  Sometimes I would just like some experienced help.   When I was a kid I would work my parent’s friend’s parties serving cheese puffs or rumaki.  Kids don’t seem to do these jobs now.  Hell I can remember teenage boys bartending at our house, too young to drink legally, but certainly capable of pouring a Scotch and soda.  I guess now you might get arrested for letting children bartend.  If only I could find a younger me so I could be the older me that is tired of doing all the work.

Catering Flashback

Posted: October 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

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.