The Dinner

This dinner was our 40th benefit dinner and we wanted it special. The phone calls started coming at 11:00am yesterday. The first one was the tables did not have the steak knives on them. It was off to the fellowship hall earlier than planned leaving at 12:30pm to fix this main problem. Mom purchased all of the steak knives for the fellowship hall a couple of years ago as even the most tender prime rib needs more than a table knife. The very first job was heading to the kitchen going straight to were the knives are kept. They weren't THERE! Holly Ramseyer and I started searching all of the cupboards and they were just not there. I started thinking perhaps someone borrowed them and forgot to bring them back. Finally Dean was told, "we just can't find the knifes" Dean looks at us like we are crazy and replies, "they are sitting in a box on top of the serving counter." He had kindly put them out all ready for use.
From that point on things started hopping but in a good way, everything easily fell into place, the choir members started showing up all ready to work and many hands made the work light. The dinner was truly the one of the best ever served. Dean and Holly out did themselves. To serve 300 people a hot perfectly done dinner all at the same time is an amazing feat. And then came the program... The choir sang 17 songs, our all time favorites. I thought people would think is this ever going to end but instead the very first person I talked to after the program exclaimed, "This blew me away!" and everybody that came up basically said the same thing, the music was AMAZING! Can you imagine how the heavenly choir will sound? Sometimes I just can't wait.
After all was done with clean up I followed Mark's truck home in case anything blew out. His truck was filled with the garbage and cardboard. The dogs were so excited when we pulled up they wouldn't leave the truck alone circling it and barking. Time for some dumpster diving! Some of the garbage bags were opened and prime rib meat and fat scraps pulled out them. They think Mark's truck is the best vehicle ever after last night. I easily filled a couple of gallon sized zip lock bags of this tasty treat, fed them a bit then headed for bed. This morning Darcy couldn't WAIT to run to the truck, stands there and barks asking "aren't you going to open these great smelling bags again?" Once was enough! Now hopefully the Meister brother workers won't show up for lunch tomorrow and think the scraps are some kind of casserole. That actually happened at mom's one year, she had the scraps in a pan in the downstairs fridge, Tim Reinhard pulled out the dish and started eating it. He thought to himself, this is terrible, mom is usually a better cook than this.