Cooking Volunteering...Need easy cheap large meal plans!

[Petals & Pixie Dust]

Hi Everyone!
I am thinking about volunteering at Ronald McDonald House and cooking a meal once a month. My question is what are good meal ideas for large groups of people??? (other than spagetti and meatloaf.... )
TIA!

 

[SAHDad]

When I was in college, one of the local churches had a retreat program. I got lucky enough to be in the kitchen for one, and and although we only had to cook for about 60, I have a few ideas:

Breakfast: pancakes or french toast scale up pretty well.

Lunch/dinner: cold cut sandwiches are fairly easy to mass produce. Chili and soup scale up very easily, and can be pretty hearty. Hamburgers are pretty easy (since you can make the patties in advance, or get them premade). A lot of pasta dishes scale up well - so in addition to spaghetti (a common staple), you can do fettucini alfredo, mac-n-cheese, or a pasta salad.

I could probably find a couple of chicken recipes which would scale up nicely as well. For how many are you cooking, and how many people are helping you cook?

 

[MazdaUK]

Any sort of big casserole dish - you can use cheap cuts of meat for this as the slow cooking makes it yummy, or use browned sausages - with baked potatoes is warm and filling.

 

[Katy Belle]

How about roast turkey?
Ham?
Roast Beef?

Baked ziti is good. Do they get a lot of pasta?

Taco salad might be good. Or tacos for that matter.

What a neat thing to do! Good luck.
Katy

 

[MazdaUK]

meant to add any casserole can be bulked out with pulses and/or root veg to make it more filling and go further

 

[Petals & Pixie Dust]

Lots of ideas...Thanks!
I'm still not certain what will be expected, but I think it will be fun. The only problem is that I am a full time student-pretty much living on loans...so, I might do office work, but I thought it would be cool to make a meal once a month.
Keep these ideas coming!
Thanks!

 

[shruley]

I stayed at a Ronald McDonald house for quite awhile. I know they are all run differently (ours was in the Twin Cities.) We were very fortunate to be provided a supper every night and lunch as well on weekends. Let me just say this was a HUGE blessing. Besides saving money, we'd have gone insane from eating fast food that much! And it just provided such a sense of normalcy to have a nice meal like that each night. Our house was very large (around 52 families I think?) so meals were prepared by a group, it would be too much for 1 person. But they did have a group of "stand-by" cooks who would come in and help cook if another group fell through.

We did get a LOT of spaghetti! Actually what I remember liking best was the groups that kind of had a smorgsboard, just bring a lot of different things (soups, chicken nuggets, different pastas or salads) the variety was nice, especially with kids. Breakfast for supper was a nice change of pace, since in general we weren't cooking ourselves big breakfasts very often. We also didn't get Mexican alot, even though tacos and things would have been easy? It was always very pasta heavy!

I hope you find volunteering there rewarding.

 

[Petals & Pixie Dust]

WOW thanks for sharing! I'm just waiting for them to call me back to confirm my application. I am going to Disney this week (leave tomorrow) So, I'm going to call and check the status of my application when I get back!