Cooking for those who Ride to Eat

This weekend was the Jon Pon Memorial Ride, a two-day ride sponsored by the Positive Pedalers. Jerry and I rode it last year, but this year we, along with friend Carey, took on new roles-- we cooked dinner and breakfast for close to 150 riders and roadies.
We worked out of Cassini Ranch in Duncan's Mills. We had some difficulty with the facility and some of the staff, but I don't want to dwell on that. I thank Wilfredo Ortiz, who was in charge of the event for the Pos Peds, for getting everything smoothed out.

What I will dwell on is the wonderful food we produced and despite the hard work, what a good time we had.

Carey was a demon at the grill, preparing around 100 pounds of chicken breast, along with a fabulous sauce of white wine, chicken broth, lemon juice, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts and mushrooms. Along with that we had roasted potatoes, a Greek pasta salad and a green salad. Before dinner we set out trays of crudite and dip and hummus and pita.
Dessert was oatmeal cake and brownies baked by Robin Abramson, who couldn't be there but baked for the group anyway. That's the kind of folks these are.

Breakfast was a variation on a quiche with diced ham and assorted veggies, croissant, mountains of fruit, orange juice and crumb cake. Gabo, one of the riders and an amazing person, works at Peets, and he got five pounds of Espresso Forte coffee donated. We cranked out pot after pot of the delicious brew.

Jerry seemed to be in at least two places at any given time-- staffing the serving line, cutting up fruit, washing a never-ending pile of serving trays and extremely difficult to clean pots. He was the dish bitch of the weekend, for sure.

We had leftovers of everything, which is how I like it to be. While some things had more left over than I would have liked, it's always hard to tell how hungry bike riders would be, and I didn't want one person to not get enough of anything he or she wanted.

We also had some money from the budget leftover. Not sure how much at this point because Jerry is still figuring out the bottom line, but whatever it is, it will go to AIDS Lifecycle.

As I said to Wilfedo, there are a hell of a lot of easier ways to make money, so rather than even looking at this in that light, I wanted to take whatever money was left over and put it back into San Francisco AIDS Foundation.