Hello there pretty pumpkins!
After the adventure that was my first catering gig yesterday, I've decided that my life in the real world is definitely blog-worthy now. It definitely won't always be pretty, but I'm sure hoping that it will usually be entertaining.
And so, without further ado - my first catering job:
A friend of mine asked me to cater for her 24 hour art-creation event called Creation24 last night. She gave me only a few days notice and a budget of $100 for about 20-30 people. In theory, it sounded great, so I said yes! Upon further thought, I realized that that left me with roughly $3/person. Yikes! But a yes is a yes, so I worked with what I had!
I came up with 3 different dishes to make - my favorite corn and bean salsa, chocolate chip cookies, and a butternut squash and pineapple curry with brown rice - all vegan of course! I refused to shop at Walmart for my ingredients, but I was surprisingly able to buy everything I needed from My Organic Market for $101.
I spent the entire day Friday preparing the dishes. The curry took the longest to make, but I knew it would be really really tasty. After a bit of a disagreement with my mom (to put it lightly) in the morning, I was left with only 3 hours to prepare everything, shower, pass off the food, and get to work by 3. At one point, I was multi-tasking getting ready for work with getting the cookies in and out of the oven, and I may or may not have been running around the kitchen with nothing but a towel on my head. After quite a scramble and some help from my mom, I got everything into the car by 2:35 - which after my 20 minute drive to work wouldn't leave me much time to pass off the food.
I knew I shouldn't have been speeding, I knew the food was precariously placed in my trunk...but my knowledge of those facts conflicted with my time constraints, and so speed I did. Boy oh boy. I hit a red light. I slammed on the breaks. As I came to a stop, I heard a thud in my trunk. I quickly threw the car into park, popped the trunk, and ran around to the back of the car. Bad news bears - my trunk now looked like a bunch of sorority girls went out for Indian food before a frat party and puked all over the trunk of my car. Not a single drop was left in the crock pot. FML! After yelling some expletives in the middle of the road, I called my mom in tears and begged her for help.
I spent the next hour on and off the phone with my mom (mind you, I was at work) trying to construct a plan for how I was going to get some kind of main dish to Creation24. So my mom, being the awesome woman that she is, offered to go back to the store, get the necessary ingredients, and remake the dish. Thank the spiritual goddess of the universe for mothers. 3 hours later, she had finished re-making my dish, packed it up, and drove it to DC in the middle of rush hour to deliver it to the event. Wowza, right?! If I didn't already, I will love her forever.
In the end, everything turned out a-ok. There was even food leftover when I went to the show after I got off work, and everyone told me how much they liked it. One good story later, my first catering job was a success!
Until next time, Happy Halloween!
Katie
