PASTA SUPPER 2013

Each year for the past eleven years, the Kickapoo Valley Reserve has held the Dam Challenge, a canoe 7 miles, bike 14 miles and run 3 miles Triathlon...and a Pasta Supper the night before.  Unfortunately due to bad weather the 2013 Dam Challenge had to be cancelled.  However, the Pasta Supper went on as usual, although with a smaller turnout.

In the first years of the Pasta Supper I made the sauces and the breads, but a few years in, a local Italian restaurant began donating the sauces.  This year, as they were unable to do that, I took over again...much to my delight.

Some of the thirty loaves of bread to be buttered and spread with garlic powder.

It took me three days, using these two kettles each day, to make enough spaghetti sauce ('suco' as we called it growing up in our Sicilian household) for the event.

The kettle begins with plain canned tomato sauce

and then...

hamburger mixed with seasoned breadcrumbs, chopped onions, fresh parsley, Romano cheese, eggs, salt and pepper...

formed into meatballs (it ended up being close to 300 meatballs)

individually browned before being lowered gently into the simmering sauce.

Then in the Sicilian tradition,  an inexpensive beef roast, pork butt, and Italian sausages are browned before being added to the sauce...

Below are five of the 14 buckets of meat sauce and 3 buckets of meatless sauce made and frozen until the event.

Ready for the first customers...

...help in the 'kitchen' preparing the salad...

Despite about only half of the normal crowd, we did pretty well.  We were able to sell quart containers of the extra sauce and loaves of bread to eager diners before they left for the evening.

Some people believe this is a daunting task I take on, but really it is simply just fun for me.  It is one of the things I most look forward to each year, making food for a crowd.