Meal Bosses

Meals are an important (some say THE important) part of the Gather. Even from the First Gather (where we didn't really have 35 people crowded around one campfire, each trying to cook their own bratwurst) this has been a primary duty of the Boss. After the second Gather, it became evident that WetLeather likes food too well to leave meal preparation to chance.

Traditionally, there is no official "lunch" meal. Assorted snacks and leftovers are made available; Gatherees are expected to scrounge for them. Bosses and MealBosses are to set out leftovers, fruit, snacks, etc. This is almost the same for Sunday morning breakfast - departure time. Generally cold cereal and fruit are set out Sunday morning, so someone needs to take responsibility for setting it out and cleaning up afterward.

It works well to have one MealBoss for each meal. This spreads responsibility so nobody need get too intimidated, yet creative cooks can and do let imagination fly. The responsibilities of a MealBoss will include:

• Prepare menu and preliminary shopping list 4 weeks in advance. Final headcount will not be known at this time, but a preliminary shopping list will help identify excessive creativity, special shopping trips, etc. in time for changes and reconsideration if necessary.
• Recruit a Crew for meal preparation. This works best of done well in advance. A meeting on-site, several hours before actual prepartaion begins, is also very helpful. One highly recommended technique is to identify very specific responsibilities for each person - "You are on scrambling eggs; you're on cooking pancakes; you are on dish washing; you are on floor sweeping". Make a list on paper and have it posted and available to all the Crews.
• Prepare the facilities and serve the meal. Appoint servers - even self-serve buffet style requires servers to replenish dishes. Clear tables and eating utensils in the common eating area if any. Set out dishes, condiments, and any other amenities.
• Please - make sure that when your crews start to work on their assigned meal that they use *only* the ingredients and supplies that were purchased for your meal. This avoids an unpleasant situation where some ingredients were used by one crew that might have negatively impacted another crew's meal.
• Clean the facilities after the meal. This includes cleaning the kitchen and any common eating areas to be sanitary for the next meal, washing dishes and pots/pans/etc. as needed, bussing carelessly-left dishes, cleaning the eating tables as appropriate, sweeping/mopping floors, picking up general trash. Proper packaging and storage of leftover food, especially anything requiring refrigeration, is a critical part of this responsibility. Make a checklist on paper to make sure that every task is known and each task has someone responsible for it.
• Saturday Dinner is tough. Everybody is present, and there is a lot going on with Award Ceremonies and dessert and such. The Saurday Dinner Mealboss must make sure to work out a sharing arrangement with the Dessert Queens for the kitchen and serving facilities. In particular, the serving line and general kitchen mess from dinner MUST be cleaned up before the Awards Ceremony begins.

You can't do it all, delegate! Have the dinner all planned in your head/on paper and assign people to do the work/prepare the food as teams. Show each team the techniques they should employ and let them go to it. Have a schedule so you know when things need to be finished/cooked. Clean as you go! You'll be much happier and the cleanup crew will thank you. Oh, yes, be sure to have a cleanup crew signed up for after dinner chores. SUPERVISE the correct storage of left over foods!

Take breaks and keep your feet up when you can! Your teams may only have to be on their feet for an hour...you'll be on them constantly, checking on all aspects of the meal. Be the conductor and orchestrate the kitchen ballet.

Serving the meal with a service team will help with portion control. If you have a limited amount of certain foods, portioning by your server is the only way to be sure everybody gets a serving of everything. Otherwise, people will see something they simply must have more of and that may leave somebody else without.

Servers should also be mindful of "seconds". The fairest workable system has been a rule: "No going back for seconds until everybody has had their Firsts." The Boss or MealBoss should remind everyone with an advance announcement, and Servers should make a friendly attempt to enforce this. It is also sensible that less food is wasted if there is a general announcement of when it is OK to go back for seconds. A lot of folks will wait "someone else" to be brave/hungry enough to go back for seconds before going back themselves. Therfore the MealBoss or Servers should announce when Seconds are available.

Several of our friends and Gatherees are "vegetarians" of one sort or another. Here are the basic differences:

• Ovo Lacto Vegetarian.
  Don't eat fish or meat but will eat eggs and other dairy products.
• Lacto Vegetarian.
  Don't eat fish, meat or eggs but will eat milk and other dairy products.
• Vegans.
  Don't eat fish, meat or any dairy product. Avoid any products of animal origin e.g. don't eat honey. Eat food from plants only.

At every meal, the Meal Boss should be considerate of these special needs and have something good available. The Boss could target vegans as it's definately the lowest common denominator - but creating an interesting meal with no meat and no dairy products can be a challenge. For very strict vegans there are some preparation rules resembling the kashrut (the law governing kosher foods), e.g. a knife which touches animal products should not touch vegan food without first being sterilized. Some vegans would throw up if they found out they'd eaten "Just a little pork and beans" in the baked beans.

It may be too much to ask for a custom cooked vegetarian main course for 3 nights if there are 3 vegetarians and 123 carnivores; it isn't an intelligent division of cooking effort. The boss can provide some $2 vegetarian entres or gardenburgers so the vegetarian offering can be something more than the meat course minus the meat (which is annoying!). Bjet bought some store bought Vegetarian Lasagnas for the 98 Gather and that worked out well. Pasta with a vegan sauce is also easy and well-received.

Some Bosses have appointed a KitchenBoss (or "Kitchen Nazi" as it was originally called before we decided to be less offensive), who holds overall responsibility for cooking and kitchen-related matters. In this type of organization, all the MealBosses report to the KitchenBoss. The KitchenBoss is responsible for consolidating the shopping list, coordinating and arbitrating between MealBosses, making sure everybody knows which food items are for their meal and which are shared, etc.

There is some difference of opinion on this position. It does introduce an additional layer of management between the Boss and the MealBosses. There is a school of thought which says that this position is extraneous; that the Boss should (and even must) do this coordination and mediation personally, to avoid mis-communication and simplify the chain of command. Another school of thought advocates a "Shopping Boss" or "Food Coordinator" for a somewhat lower-key version of this responsibility. See Shopping.

It probably depends on the enthusiasm and experience and organizational skills of the KitchenBoss. If a highly motivated person with good experience can be found, he or she can make up for a lot of inexperience in the various meal crews. In any case, it is of course up to the Boss to decide how to organize and whether or not to use a Kitchen Boss.

Saturday Dessert Queens are a time-honored and immensely popular tradition. Don't piss them off.

The Saturday dessert grew out of a wedding "celebration" in 1995. Ellen brought cakes to The Gather that were ready to serve (carrot and marble, I think). It kind of grew from there when 'cesca and Ellen took the challenge of providing stuff that you wouldn't expect to find at a campout (like the really luscious ganache sauce).

One of the things discovered over time was that the cooking had to be finished before the dinner prep started. Have everything prepared and ready to go as soon as a spot is cleared. It also *really* helps for the dessert serving if the dinner clean up crew is finished before the awards ceremony. Sometimes that just doesn't happen. One way or another, tragically, Dessert Queens have rarely made it to the entire awards ceremony.

Experienced Dessert Queens strongly recommend a Co Dessert Boss. It is *much* easier if there are at least two people to see to volunteer help and set up.