Flavors: Breakfast burritos for 67 — Advance meal planning essential to … – Enterprise

Click photo to enlargeMy favorite essay of the school year was the “What I Did Last Summer” report my teachers always assigned the first week back. Jealous of my friends’ summers, I fantasized about writing about exotic places such as Hawaii, which is exotic, and Pensacola, Fla., which seemed exotic to me at age 10.

Instead, my reports were about wonderful camping trips with my family to Eagle Lake. My “career” as a food writer was evident even then: The main content of my reports consisted of how to grill Eagle Lake Trout. (“Keep the fish whole, stuff it with parsley, garlic, lemon, and butter, wrap it in foil and grill it over medium coals until the fish is flaky.”)

If we were lucky, we camped for 10 days, and that was vacation. Now, my summers are more jam-packed. My family and I take our own vacation for at least a week, and the rest of the summer is spent camping. It’s not your run-of-the mill camping, though. We take kids with us, lots of kids.

This summer, for four weeks out of five, my husband and I helped organize and run trips for our nonprofit group, Wilderness Experience. Wilderness Experience is a program that helps at-risk youth discover their value and worth while exploring the wilderness of California. Jim and I, along with our team, took up to 47 junior high and high school students whitewater rafting on Klamath River, boating on Lake Almanor, rock climbing and swimming in Feather River Canyon, and exploring the ocean at Fort Bragg.

These trips stretch students

physically, spiritually and socially as they learn to put the group’s needs above their own or take challenging, but managed risk such as jumping off a rock into a swimming hole. We teach “challenge by choice.” No one is forced to take a risk, but they are encouraged to trust us as they push themselves beyond their comfort zones.

My role on these trips is meal planning and preparation. I write menus months before our first trip begins so we can set the budget. My goals in planning the meals for our students are: They should be highly nutritious, taste great and be reasonably priced. We charge $35 per student per trip and most students are sponsored, so keeping cost down is paramount.

For our Lake Almanor trip I planned seven meals for 67 people. Menus were simple. I chose peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for two of the lunches, hotdogs for our lake day lunch, two hot dinners, a hot breakfast and cold cereal on the last morning.

I put a lot of thought into the dinners and the hot breakfast. I did as much advance preparation as possible. It takes quite a bit of time to cook that much food over an open fire and one gas burner.

My husband and I shopped Tuesday for a trip beginning Thursday. By 7:30 that morning, I had everything sorted and had begun cooking. My dinners were taco salad for night one, and barbecued chicken legs, beans and potato salad for night two. Breakfast was breakfast burritos.

My preparation looked like this for the taco salad: Brown and season 18 pounds of ground beef and 15 cans of pinto beans and grate three pounds of cheddar. For the burritos I grated an additional three pounds of cheese, baked eight pounds of tater tots, browned and seasoned seven pounds of sausage, and cracked, beat and seasoned 144 eggs.

To make the chicken, we grilled 150 legs and made baked beans from scratch using the classic “dump and taste” method (which means it will taste different next time). Using a roaster oven, I added molasses, vinegar, brown sugar, dry mustard, onions, bacon, ketchup and yellow mustard to 30 cans of assorted beans until it tasted good. Finally, I froze the beef, chicken, cheese, tots, sausage and beans.

The eggs stayed in zip-top bags in my refrigerator.

After 10 hours, everything is ready for a trip. All the preparation means I can have meals on the table in an hour, leaving me ample time to play and invest into the students. I can’t think of a better way to spend a summer.

Annie Culp is a graduate of UC Davis, a fitness instructor and has a husband and three children to feed. E-mail her at annie@orchard church.com.