Food For The Hungry

A couple weeks ago it was our turn to cook up food for Serve City/Chosen. Our church helps a shelter, and one of the things we do for them is a family (or couple families in our case) signs up for a Sunday dinner. We meal plan, purchase the food, prepare, take it to them, SERVE them, make several extra plates to leave behind, bring home the rest and divvy up what is left between our 2 families. So on Saturday Sam and I set out to purchase all the food. What we bought was (I should have taken a picture, guess I didn't think of the packaged food picture):
8# of ground round
5# of bagged salad
5# of mozzarella cheese
140 oz of diced tomatoes
2# of shredded cheddar cheese
2# carrots
celery leaves (they charged me 3 cents) did they really need the 3 pennies? I'm not complaining, it's just weird, the produce guy put a upc code on that read 25cents but rang up 3 cents.
40 oz of pasta shells
3# of spaghetti sauce
6 onions (Monica had these on hand) That is the other family a.k.a Tom's wife or Cori, Seth and Joel's mom. They're part of several post so I thought I'd tell you who she is.
1# tomato paste from Monica's pantry
7-2 litters of pop Monica had these on hand
1# of bacon bits
2 mega size cans of green beans
We borrowed the salad dressing from our church refrig.

Whew! I think that's all for the food. I had a recipe I've been wanting to try and it was called Gorilla casserole (feeds 20 hungry people) I took from this recipe and another and multiplied it by 3. We're supposed to cook for 40 but we like left overs and NEVER want to run out of food. Second and THIRD helpings are ALWAYS offered.

I dropped Sam off at home and headed over to Monica's and we cooked on Saturday.

Here are some pictures:

We had a HUGE pot (not pictured)that took a long time to boil water for the pasta but it worked.

This is the tomato mixture with added spices

Cori browned up ALL 8 pounds of burger in 2 frying pans while Monica and I chopped up carrots, onions, and celery leaves.We eventually dumped the meat mixture in the big pot of tomato mixture and then I scooped it evenly into 2 large pans.We cleaned up the kitchen and I took the pots home to keep in my refrig till the next day when Tom stopped after church to take one home to bake and I baked the other one in my oven. We met at Chosen and the folks there were so gracious telling us how much they appreciate all the meat we put in and it tasted so delicious.

Monica's mom made the dessert and it was really good. Some kind of pumpkin and peach bars.

In the very top picture you can see how we over did it, these dishes are the left overs plus another 9x13 pan not pictured. This works for me because I'm having company for Easter and this will be our Saturday dinner.