This will be heavily edited over the next couple days, as I look up the final numbers for things. I estimated high on things, because with this style of feast, it's hard to guess how much people will eat and I wanted to be sure to have enough.
Here's what I bought: (will be adding, need to get photocopies of receipts from Anne because mine got eaten by the cats)
80lbs ground beef
88lbs chicken
86lbs beef roasts (3-22+lb roasts, 4 5-lb roasts)
2-restaurant size jars queen spanish olives - roughly 400 olives
8 gallons whole milk
3/4 gallon buttermilk (1-1/2 gal, 1 quart)
6 quarts heavy whipping cream
105 lbs mushrooms (50 sliced crimini, 30 white button, 25 crimini stuffers)
15lbs parsnips
15lbs turnips
60lbs yams
40lbs potatoes
40lbs carrots
35 dozen eggs
200 lbs of flour
1 box corn starch
6 lbs of yeast (used all but one pound)
10 lbs baking soda (we used maybe 1/3 of the bag, but it was cheaper to buy it this way than to buy individual boxes.)
30lbs white sugar
50lbs powdered sugar (we used all but one bag)
30lbs brown sugar (used all but one bag)
1 gallon vanilla
1 large bottle vanilla extract
2lbs blanched almonds
2lbs pine nuts
11lbs walnuts
20lbs cheese for slicing (10 cheddar, 10 swiss)
5lbs swiss cheese for mushroom pies
28lbs shredded mixed cheese
8lbs feta cheese
24 oz bleu cheese
24 oz gorgonzola
64 oz Philly cream cheese (smalls for olives)
4lbs Philly cream cheese (for other stuff)
20lbs egg noodles
20lbs mixed fresh veggies
20lbs baby carrots
2 large jars Jerry's dill dip
6lbs frozen spinach
1 food-service-size container Italian Seasoning
1 similarly sized Parsley
1 similarly sized Cinnamon
1 similarly sized Sea Salt
1 large container iodized salt
20 lbs butter
1lb slivered almonds for decoration
6 small jars whole cloves
2 small jars ground cloves
4 small jars nutmeg (and one big one)
8 small jars ginger
4 oz ginger root
4 star anise bits (donated by me, since I have a huge jar and I hate anise)
4 oz ceylon cinnamon (again, donated by me, since I have a ton of it)
1 large jar cardamon
1 container black pepper
16lbs of honey
4lbs unseasoned breadcrumbs
12 loaves white bread for bread pudding (on sale at Rainbow for 3 loaves for $1.98)
1 string fresh garlic
1 2lb jar minced garlic (we used all of this)
16 lbs dried dates
20 lbs dried apricots
5 lbs dried mango
20 lbs dried raisins
5lbs dried currants
2lbs dried cherries
1lb dried, ground orange peel
4 lemons
4 gallons white vinegar
2 gallons organic cider vinegar
10 liters olive oil
4 boxes knox unflavoured gelatin (unused)
3lbs chickpeas
2 liters lemon juice
50lbs rice (half went uncooked and unused and went home with Jenny the patient)
12 gallons apple juice
2lbs good coffee (donated by Ursula)
10lbs generic coffee
1 huge container creamer
1 box food service size sugar containers
4 boxes cocoa packets (240 packets?)
4 food service size jars baby dill pickles
6 food service size cans sliced pears in syrup (2 left over)
50lbs of apples
20lbs pears
20lbs oranges
20lbs grapes
3 containers Almond Milk
3 containers Vegetable Broth (unused)
64 oz sliced strawberries in syrup
3lbs dried chickpeas.
Total spent: Original budget: $1850, asked for $250 more and got it. Went over that by something like $12, because I bought the sliced strawberries and bread for bread pudding. I don't know yet how many people that fed.
.. I know I'm forgetting things, but this is done from numbers I remember off the top of my head.
What we had too much of:
Mushrooms. If you ever need really good mushrooms in very good prices and large quantities, go to Forest Mushrooms in St. Cloud. The thick-sliced crimini cooked up beautifully and had less shrinkage than other mushrooms I've worked with. The leftovers, we cooked up, threw some butter on, and put out for people to dish up. Most of them were gone by the end of the evening. The button mushrooms - my gods, if I never see a button mushroom again in my life, I'll be only too happy :) I marinated 15lbs of them and we cooked most of the rest into other things. I think we had 10lbs left over? They went to a good home. The mushroom caps all got eaten. Amusing side note: I'm very badly allergic to mushrooms and can't eat them at all.
Speaking of things I can't eat (vegetarian) - we also had too much chicken. I suspect this isn't a case of 'too much', but a case of 'was out too late'. It went out after court, due to unforseen problems with the outlets in the kitchen. We couldn't have roasters plugged in, which seriously hampered my ability to get the meat out in a reasonable amount of time, because warming the meat took an hour and heating up the pies took 20 minutes. However, it did go out, and all but one pan got eaten. People were taking it home. I've been told that it cooked up well and yummy a day later. (By Justin, who bemoaned not taking more home, because he doesn't know the person who cooked it and she doesn't know the recipes by heart and she's /never/ willing to cook for him and she didn't post the recipes so he could cook it for himself either. /amused sarcasm)
Less apples. All the fresh cut up ones got eaten, very few of the baked ones did. I suspect this is, again, a case of 'out too late'.
Rice. This was my bad - I needed 50lbs cooked rice, I bought 50 lbs uncooked. It was a whopping $11 expense, so I'm not worried about it, but it meant hauling a 50lb bag of rice around. Had we wound up needing more food, it would have been an emergency backup.
Desserts. Again, out too late. We had them ready, we just had nowhere to put them because the food was still out. Still, many of them got eaten. I think the biggest hit was the rice pudding. I had one portion of that left over.
Food in general. I think if/when I do this again, I will cut down the number of different dishes, or the amount of each. Partly this was overestimating, and partly just due to the way I cook. I feed small armies.
What we didn't have enough of:The only thing we could've used more of was hot drinks, and unfortunately, there wasn't anything we could do about that. The coffee pots on site worked very poorly. The barony just bought a new coffee pot, but in the shuffle, it got sent back to the car and by the time we'd have gotten it out, washed, set up and brewed, it would've been too late to do much good. My apologies for that - we did try, and we did the best we could by boiling water on the stove and setting it up in the coolers, and making coffee on the stove and pouring it into the coffee pots hot.
Stuffed eggs. I had no idea those would go over as well as they did. I've never, ever seen any sort of devilled egg go over so well. They're an item that can't sit out very long, so I made 180 portions (90 eggs/7.5 dozen) and they were gone as fast as we could put them on the table.
I haven't heard any "I wish there'd been more of.." We did run out of a few things faster than I'd anticipated, (like the stuffed eggs and the pumpkin purses) but I didn't hear anyone complaining about it. I also didn't hear of anyone going hungry.
What I'd do differently next time: Had I known about the outlet problem on site - all the kitchen was on one circuit, so we'd plug a roaster in and trip it - I'd have gotten to site sooner and gotten the meat ready first. The sauerbraten takes 4-5 hours to cook, and unfortunately, due to the rushed nature of how we had to cook it, it got very dry and most of the "sour" broiled out of it. This is NOT a recipe flaw - this is directly due to how we had to cook it. The test batch worked splendidly. That was the only meat not pre-cooked - and again, had I known about the outlet problem, I'd have pre-cooked that as well. We had to make the choice of getting the small, quick-to-heat food out or hogging the ovens with meat that would take an hour or two to defrost and warm through, and it was my decision to have the meat go out late so we could get the pies out soonest.
Signage. We had signs. I didn't tape them to the table, and they went AWOL fairly quickly. I feel bad about that, because the salt-free stuff was thusly unmarked, and I have no idea if the people who needed salt-free food got to eat anything. There was also confusion between which container had the hot cider and which had the hot water, which lead to a few interesting cocoa or tea/cider blends happening.
The !%#!^% coffee pots. I'd have insisted ours be brought in and set up first thing. I did request it, but then the on-site coffee pots started brewing - or so we thought. We did get the coffee out, but we needed a lot more of it a lot sooner than we had it. I'm sorry, folks. I should've done better with this.
Lots and lots more ziplocks. I think I warned people on here to bring some, but I should have repeated it closer to the event. It would solved my food overage quite nicely. As it was, people were finding inventive ways to haul things home, which made me happy. Throwing away food makes me cry.
Salt on the tables. There was supposed to be rosemary and salt on the tables. Guess what I forgot to put out, and didn't notice until we were packing up to leave? Woops.
Better organization. That would have been facilitated if I'd been able to get a walkthrough. It was organized chaos, but less of the 'chaos' could have been achieved.
People got fed, I've so far heard no complaints at all (knock on wood), we had leftovers but nothing from during the day, so again, I'm assuming it's a matter of 'out too late'. People seemed happy with the variety and the amounts of food.
I call it a win. We had a great event. Thank you to everyone who ate the food and saved me from having to throw much of it out or haul it home. :)
