RS Valentine's Day Dinner

As an Enrichment committee, we decided that since our Relief Society activity night fell on Valentine's Day, that we'd do a dinner for couples!  We thought we might be lucky to get 75-80 people, but when the sign up sheet went around we ended up with over 125 signed up!  It has been a very busy month trying to get everything planned, prepped and set up.  We spent a few hours Tuesday night getting all the tables and chairs set up and the linens and centerpieces put on.  Thankfully, one of our committee members owns a wedding decorating business and she allowed us to use her decor for the dinner!  It doesn't really show much in the picture, but it was really cute.

 All day long today I ran from one thing to another.  It was quite a crazy day!  I ended up getting called to see if I could help out in Ben's class for an hour and, for some reason, I said yes.  I was getting messages while I was at the school for other errands that I needed to do! 

As soon as I was done at the school, I went down to Extra Foods and got more carrots (I was worried that we wouldn't have enough).  I then dropped off more olive oil to Sara who was cooking all the chicken and had run out of oil.  I got home, peeled and chopped the other 10 lbs of carrots that I'd just bought and then took all 40 lbs of carrots over to Shannon's so that she could cook them for us.  She's not on the committee, but was gracious enough to use her double ovens and help out!

I then had to get six pans of rice ready to go in the oven before I got everything else loaded into the van so that I could take it to the church.  Unfortunately, a blizzard had blow in this afternoon, so I ended up having to shovel sidewalks first so that I could unload!  I got everything unloaded and before long we were in the thick of things!  We were trying to keep rice warm in the ovens, while getting the chicken and sauce reheated (while blowing breakers, etc), cutting and heating up the bread, plating desserts, making salads, etc.  It was a zoo!!  Thankfully, some of the sisters arrived early and came in to help!  We just about had a disaster when one of the sisters turned the ovens up and we just about had a fire when the parchment paper on the bread got quite scorched.  We couldn't use some of the bread as it got burnt, but we managed to get enough for each table.

We started only a few minutes late and it went really well!  We had everything in large roasters, so as long as we were careful not to plug two in at the same time, we were okay!  We fed about 130 people and even had enough for people to come get seconds!  We did learn an important lesson about rice... it triples when cooked.  We had LOTS left over!  ha! ha!

 We had a short program after the dinner.  Don Pierson sang, Jill Heninger played a song on the piano and Shawn & Linda Olsen sang.   It was just the right thing to end the evening.

Thankfully, we didn't have to take any of the chairs or tables down since there is a Stake Appreciation dinner tomorrow night (that we get to go to).  Clean up went fairly smoothly.  We'd used real dishes and silverware for the dinner, so we had lots of washing up to do, but we were home before 10:00!  Everyone that talked to me seemed to really enjoy the evening.  I'm grateful so many came out even with the rotten weather.  It made it worth the effort!