For several months, in my capacity as the second counselor in the stake young women's presidency, I have been helping plan a stake youth conference. It has been a somewhat exhausting process as we have also been planning girls camp at the same time. We must not ever do youth conference and girls camp in the same year again. I was asked to head-up the food committee and have had several talks with youth about what they would like to eat. Our big activity was today, an all-day funfest at Mutual Dell, a Church owned camp up American Fork Canyon. We needed to serve lunch and dinner and decided we would do Cafe Rio salads for lunch and J-Dawgs for dinner. I had a good committee, including Kent, Brandt, and Blythe, who helped prepare lots of food last night, and some of the same people who helped prepare and serve today at the event.
We had a few funny hiccups worth mentioning. For the Cafe Rio salads, we washed and cut up all the lettuce last night. We put it all in white garbage bags so that we could just serve up the lettuce into clamshells and have each person take a box and top it with what they wanted. We were feeding about 150 people, and I thought we had plenty of greenery.
We got all the foodstuff unloaded this morning, threw meat, rice, and beans into the oven to warm, then began filling clamshells. We got to 75 containers and ran out of greenery. We only had half of what we needed. With an hour and 15 minutes before we had to begin serving lunch, Brandt and I jumped in the car and raced down the canyon to the Macy's grocery store near the mouth of the canyon. We threw bags of spinach, heads of lettuce, and bunches of romaine into the cart, raced to pay, then sped back up the canyon. The food prep team had everything else ready to go, laid out and set, so we quickly washed and chopped lettuce. We had everything ready with about ten minutes to spare.
Lunch was delicious, everyone had enough to eat, and we only ran out of dressing. We should have made a couple more batches, but it was hard to gauge how much we would need. We only had a bit of chicken and some beans left over, making me feel pretty good about my quantity judging with everything else. As we began to clean up, I opened one of the two refrigerators we were using and discovered six packages of cheese we had forgotten to put out. So irritating! Oh well. I am confident we'll be able to use it for girls camp.
The other hiccup came at dinnertime when we needed to grill 300 hotdogs. We needed to transport all of dinner up the mountain to a pavilion away from the kitchen in the lodge, but I was prepared. I had small foil squares so we could wrap each dog and coolers to place them in to keep them warm. I had plenty of bodies to help grill and wrap, and I thought I was gauging time to start based on the size of the grill (enormous). We fired it up about 40 minutes before we needed to start hauling food up the mountain, but the grill took a really long time to heat up, and it didn't heat up evenly. There were hot spots and cold spots and seemingly no spots, all in the same grill. It was incredibly frustrating. However, Kent and several other men finally got into a rhythm and dogs started getting done. Five of us wrapped dogs and Blythe stacked them in the coolers. It came together and we had plenty of food. So much food, in fact, that we brought home several dozen hotdogs at the end of the night.
Apart from eating, the kids participated in classes, did several activities, and heard a couple really good speakers. They were divided into groups of kids from all over the stake, not just our ward, and they had a good time. Brandt had a better time than Blythe, but she was super helpful with food!
After lunch, we doing food had a break. Ryan and Katey Ward had driven up from Alpine in a Razer and took me and Nora Cassel for a ride up above Tibble Fork. It was loud good fun! With more time after our break, I went in search of the kids. Janie Rasmussen was one of the presenters and I listened to her talk.
I found Brandt about to participate in an activity that I joined. We were each blindfolded and then walked along a rope that took us to a final destination. It represented out mortal journey back to our Heavenly Father. We were not to talk while doing it, but at the end, we discussed our experiences. The whole experience made me cry and cry. A couple of times along the way, someone gave gentle promptings about a more difficult part of the path, and we were seated by someone who took our arm at the end. Although blindfolded, I could sense that I was next to Brandt. I cried because I am so happy that Brandt is on the covenant path and wants to make good choices. More than anything, I want to be in the Celestial Kingdom with my family, and sitting next to Brandt brought me so much joy. I was very moved by the whole experience.
I was also with Brandt when his group had to get everyone off a sinking ship over shark infested waters. They had to swing on a rope and land on a small platform. Brandt made it over and then caught others as they swung across.
The concluding activity after our delicious J Dawg dinner, was to have each group perform a skit or a song. Each group had practiced something during one of their rotations, and it was fun to see what they had come up with. Brandt's group did a skit. Blythe didn't participate with her group.
All in all, it seemed like a great day to me. The kids had a good time, everyone was well fed, and the activities were stellar. While I can report it was success, I can also say we are glad we won't have to do it again next year.
Helping save fellow travelers
Helping prepare dinner for fellow participants
Helping with a skit
