Thursday, June 19, 2008

Remember the pork cooking I volunteered to do for the big church dinner coming up?

Mom and I just did the calculating and it looks like we’re talking about 44-46 pork tenderloins that need cooking. We figure I can maybe cook 4-6 at a time in my one oven. She can triple that amount since she has three ovens, one of which is convection. So Mom is going to help me do the roasting.

I just did the calculations for the marinade recipe. The original recipe makes 1 cup of marinade. Factor 1 cup needed per tenderloin and we’re talking about nearly 2 gallons of marinade needed. So using the conversion formula for increasing recipes (it’s not a simple thing, actually, especially for the math challenged like I am), it looks like we’re going to need 2 gallons of orange juice alone. The recipe is an Asian-ish citrus marinade.

I have not done this level of mass cooking since I was in culinary school and even then I never cooked this amount of food by myself. At least I don’t have to do the side dishes, too. I’m nervous about screwing this up, but I’m also kind of excited for the challenge. And I’m grateful for my Mom’s help.

[Added Later]: I’m also doing a sauce for the meat, which is basically the marinade but I’ll add some marmalade and cornstarch to thicken it. So I need to triple the marinade ingredients (figuring 1/2 cup servings of sauce).

Yikes.