This will be the finale of my girls camp posts. It might also be the most boring post to read from start to finish, so feel free to skip this one if it isn't relevant to you. I'm writing this to share information that might be helpful for others planning food for the masses (and for myself, if needed in the future).
For our camp, which was held at Heber Valley Camp, we served all of our meals as a stake, which means we had 150+ mouths to feed repeatedly each day. We had a really nice, industrial kitchen that made this possible. We had stoves, a microwave, a walk-in fridge (and freezer), big sinks, a really big oven, and a warming oven. It was pretty slick, and the accommodations made it really easy. Since most camps don't have such amenities, the plans I outline here aren't ideal for all camps. Keep that in mind. But you may find something helpful anyway.
We utilized a food committee. I've been asked by a few people why we didn't have the wards take turns doing the meals, and the reason for that is that there were so many activities at the camp going on all day long that we didn't want any wards to have to miss activities to prepare their meals. It would be a bummer to have to miss out on the lake because it was your turn to cook, so it worked best at this particular camp to have a committee working on food that would allow everyone else to enjoy what the camp had to offer. Yes, they were a bit spoiled in that way, but sometimes that's just how it works out!
Our menu was planned with the Youth Camp Leaders. They gave me a list of the meals they wanted (along with snacks and other requests), and then I worked out a meal schedule around their suggestions.
Here is our camp menu:
When feeding such large groups, I really like doing "bar style" meals that allow everyone to make their food the way they want, so it was nice that the girls wanted things like hoagies, Hawaiian haystacks, walking tacos, etc. These types of meals help accommodate picky eaters and food allergies more easily.
At our camp we had eight gluten free eaters, one peanut allergy, and one dairy allergy. Two of our gluten free eaters have Celiac, which requires more caution than wheat allergies and gluten intolerance, so we were extra careful with our GF food. We had separate dishes and utensils for everything and had a GF table set up for every meal.
I started shopping for camp food in May. I made a master grocery list and did some price comparing. I did a lot of research about quantities and food preparation methods. I wanted to do as much work prior to camp as possible in order to keep things as simple as they could be at camp.
My committee and I pre-cooked everything we could. This meant we had to round up lots and lots of freezer space leading up to camp, but it was worth the effort. At camp, we did hardly any cooking - mostly warming. We cooked all the bacon, sausage, ground beef, and taco mix before camp and froze it. I also baked cookies, cornbread, and breadsticks and froze them.
I kept a running list of everything I needed to buy and watched for good deals. I found mark downs on several things and even got some stuff for free. We inherited a bunch of extra food from Stake Young Men camp (mostly lunch meat and snacks), and I was able to get a bunch of additional deli turkey for free (so much that I still have a freezer full), and I got a great deal on some slightly outdated bakery items from Bimbo... which ended up being a bit of a snafu with the Pinguino cupcakes (they were moldy!) but worked out just fine with the Little Bites. A family from our stake let us use their nacho cheese machines and donated the cheese, and one of the wards had a huge bag of liquid eggs (the equivalent of 180 eggs) and 5 lbs of bacon leftover from youth conference that they sent our way.
We ended up coming in way under budget, which was great because it's so hard to estimate how much food is going to cost for an event like this. I couldn't have made a guess in the beginning! I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "I will do my best."
In the end, we did a pretty good job figuring out quantities. There were some wonderful successes and a few hiccups, but overall, everything worked out great. We ran short on a few things and had excess of others, but not so much that it was a problem (it wasn't like YM camp where half the boys ate all the food and the other half had to wait an hour and a half for the leaders to run into town to buy more).
Here are some of the things that went well:
The Food Lines
I wanted quick and efficient food lines. I wanted to move the girls through the lines as fast as possible because we only had one hour to serve lunch and get cleaned up before the next activities began. I don't like cafeteria style serving because it holds up the lines, so to control portions, I put butcher paper over the tables for every meal and wrote the portion information next to the food. We had two sets of food tables so we could have four lines moving at once. Then when the lines died down, we would consolidate all the food to one table so people could come back for more while we started cleaning up.
For the most part, the girls were good to stick with the portions written on the tables. There were a couple of times we had to jump in ("Take it easy on the hashbrowns, ladies!") but as soon as everyone had gone through the line, there were plenty of seconds of most things.
Please, please, please, if you get nothing else from this post - take this back to your circle of influence and help make food lines run more efficiently in the world! Nothing makes me more crazy than a single-file food line when people could be going down both sides of the table.
Ice blocks
I found some 2 gallon sized Rubbermaid, cylindrical containers at the DI and used them to make ice blocks to put in our big orange jugs with lemonade. That made the ice last a lot longer than cubes would have (and helped keep the lemonade flavorful - I wasn’t going to let the lemonade get watered down on my watch!)
Disposable Steam Tray Pans
I bought small and large steam table pans from Sam’s Club to use for serving. We washed them and reused them several times, and then, during the last 24 hours of meals, we started throwing them away slowly. They were super handy.
Rice
For Monday night’s dinner, we needed rice. I found a tip buried in the comments of a blog that recommended putting 12 cups of Minute Rice in a large roasting pan and pouring in 12 cups of boiling water, covering with foil, and letting sit for 15 minutes. We did that with all our rice, and it worked perfectly! The only problem was I was missing a box of rice, and I’m not sure what happened to it, so we didn’t have much rice for seconds.
Task Lists
For each meal I made a list of all the ingredients (with quantities) needed for that meal and the tasks that needed to be done. That helped me direct people and gave my helpers enough info to self-start. I wanted to make sure that when people were there to help that I had assignments for them and didn’t have to meddle through my brain fog to remember what needed to be done. I still wandered around in circles a lot, but most of the time when someone offered to help, I was able to give them a job.
I also planned to do everything early so we weren’t tackling much right before the meal, for example, on the day we served a baked potato bar for dinner, I had the YCLs wash and wrap the potatoes during breakfast prep. We stayed hours ahead on everything, but I had to map out a plan to make it effective. I wrote out times and tasks for each meal and posted them on the cooler each day.
The Leftover/Snack Table
We kept a table out all the time for leftovers and snacks. We put out peanut butter and jelly for every meal as an alternative to what was being served, and then I would occasionally put out snacks and other leftovers. It was great because it helped us use stuff up and also gave the girls some additional options.
I wasn’t sure what to plan on snack-wise. I read some commentary online from others who have fed stakes at camp, and a lot of them said that the girls didn’t really eat the snacks, and they ended up with a lot leftover. They attributed this to girls bringing their own snacks from home, to wards providing snacks, and to the girls just being really full from all the meals.
At our camp, the snacks got eaten, so we must’ve planned just the right amount. The girls weren’t super interested in Gogurt, string cheese, or applesauce (even though the YCLs requested those things). I planned on one per person for those items, and we had quite a bit leftover even after setting them out several times. They went nuts with chips, granola bars, Goldfish, and candy (thanks to Christie for bringing candy because I didn’t bring any candy, and the girls attacked it). So I guess you could say… the junk food went first.
Taco Mixture
For walking tacos, I followed the recommendation at
Mel’s Kitchen Cafe and used her
Floating Taco Bowls meat mixture to save money. I think it cut the cost of the meat by more than half (as opposed to doing straight taco meat/ground beef). I made all of the mixture before camp and froze it, so all we had to do at camp was warm it up. It worked really well.
Some Things I Learned:
1. The Young Women work very, very slowly. I knew this, and yet, I was still blown away. So if you have YW helping in the kitchen, make sure you allow plenty of time or give them tasks that don’t have a tight deadline. I am not exaggerating, I could have cooked all the French toast by myself faster than the six YW did together. It was so hard for me to not take over. I would just stand back and occasionally say things like, “It looks like there’s space on that griddle to slide all of that bread over and fit 15 more pieces!”
2. They want tons and tons of hashbrowns. They don't want a small scoop in their breakfast burritos (which is what I planned for). They want them heaping as a side dish. Buy more hashbrowns. They will get eaten.
3. Serving utensils break, and you will need more. Bring extra. I left a bunch home thinking I had too many. I needed them. We had at least one serving utensil break every meal, and by the end of camp, we were scrounging for utensils, and I had to have someone bring us more.
Also, a really good can opener is a necessity!
4. They liked broccoli more than I thought they would (on the potato bar). We ran out fast.
5. The girls will be sneaky and try to get away with not using their mess kits. Mess kits were required at this camp to save on waste, and the girls were supposed to bring them to each meal and then wash their dishes afterward. We had girls trying to eat off napkins and even out of their hands. They would use lids out of the garbage or whatever they could find in place of their mess kits. Eventually I had to have someone monitor the napkins because they were going through them so fast. I even took the napkins back in the kitchen at one point and wrote a reminder on the butcher paper, “Don’t forget your mess kit!” Sometimes I would find dishes in the sink that girls had snuck out of the kitchen to eat off of. How nice of them to leave them for me to wash!
6. The funnest parts of camp meals (for me) were the improvisational parts. I bought waaaaaaay too many chow mein noodles for Hawaiian Haystacks, and I also had 5 leftover bags of marshmallows, and a tub of margarine that I forgot to put out. Someone recommended making birds nests, and I thought that was a great idea. I didn’t have a recipe or internet access, so I just winged it and made them rice crispy treat style. Then I remembered someone in my cabin had brought a big bag of Easter candy, so I went and checked to see if there were any robin’s eggs in there. Lo and behold, I had little eggs to add to my nests!
7. For the pasta bar, the Alfredo sauce was the most popular and first to disappear (it was also the most expensive, so I intentionally didn’t do as much). In hindsight (and now that I know we came in way under budget), I would do lots more Alfredo! People were devastated that we were out of Alfredo!
8. Sack lunches would be smart for the first meal. When we were planning, we discussed whether we should provide lunch the first day or have everyone bring their own packed lunches. We decided to do hoagies, and it was fine. BUT… I now know that the first meal is the hardest one to get out. We got to camp at 8:00 a.m. and we worked out butts off getting everything unloaded and organized, and when it was time to serve lunch, we made it by the skin of our teeth. This was also the meal that we had the least help for because the leaders were all tied up with other things. My advice would be to take this into consideration if you’re planning meals for a camp.
9. I recommend having a committee member specifically assigned to oversee food allergies and dietary needs. Since I have prepped a lot of GF food at Celiac standards for my ward in the past, I took on that role at camp. If you don’t have someone keeping watch, it’s easy to have cross contact. Even with signs up, I still had to shoo people away from the GF table a few times.
As a side note, people started realizing that the GF people didn’t have to wait in line for food, and a few people started sneaking food from the GF table, so that was one more thing I had to watch out for. Those sneaky little sneaks!!! (And it wasn’t all youth. I caught adult leaders doing it too!)
10. Grocery pickup was a lifesaver!
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I’m sure I’ll add more to this post over time as more things come to mind, but this is a good start. If you stumble across this post and would like more information about quantities for food or anything else, email me! Fluentbrittish@gmail I have a spreadsheet with way more info than you’d ever want to look at, and I’m ready to help you out!
