Fabulous Festive FoodCycle Feast

This was my final GoodGym task of the day - and a rare hat trick of GoodGymming for me. I was on the cooking team at FoodCycle, and we had been asked to prepare a three course festive menu for about 45 guests.

With only two of us in the kitchen to begin with, this seemed like quite a challenge, but the precooked food leftover form a pensioners lunch earlier in the day gave us some reassurance that we could do this. I had also bought 8 packs of mince pies from my freezer (stored there from a previous week) and put with another 8 packs, this would be the dessert sorted as long as I was happy to make up a 3 litre batch of custard to serve with them.

Jordi from Foodcycle had decided on a frittata for a starter and I would prepare a festive salad surprise to go with it. The surprise being the addition of some shredded Brussel sprouts to make a couple of iceberg lettuces and 4 cartons of piccolo tomatoes stretch a bit further. Fortunately we were then joined by another two Foodcycle volunteers, Mayra and Raj, who started work on the veg for the frittata while I peeled, parboiled and got some additional potatoes into the oven to roast to make sure we had enough for the expected diners. Swede and carrot was cooked and mashed, carrots roasted with honey. Mayra made some elegant stuffing balls, and some gravy was soon bubbling away not he stove. I was then in charge of roasting some Quorn turkey substitute roasts as the centre of the main course.

Soon the guests were arriving, and were soon pulling crackers and enjoying an initial glass of juice, before tucking into a rather sumptuous festive feast.

After my trio of tasks today I was pretty exhausted when I returned but was so pleased to sink into the sofa with a cup of tea and a cup cake which had been a surprise take home for all the guests tonight.