We've had quite a few questions about how we can cook Easter breakfast for 100 people, with four hot plates and a 1 cubic foot oven. So today, I thought I'd share with you what it's like.
We'd been pretty tired leading up to April, so we put off the decision on whether or not to hold an Easter breakfast outreach until after we returned from vacation. If we were sufficiently rested, we would do so.
This also meant that when we decided to go ahead, we had less than two weeks to pull it off. Here's how it went.
10 days before (Thursday):
We designed and ordered 500 invitations to be distributed in our community. Here's what they looked like:
Easter breakfast invitations
9 days before (Friday):
I sent digital copies of the invitations to all our friends, ESL students, and other contacts via text. Quite a few of them said definitively that they would come.
We own one hot plate, so we asked the church members if we could borrow theirs. We asked them to bring them to the church this Sunday (a week before) so we could see what we'd be working with.
Our hot plate
6 days before (Saturday):
Our flyers arrived.
I created a master schedule for the Easter breakfast tasks.
7 days before (Sunday):
We made an announcement at church and distributed 1/3 of the flyers to the church members, so that they could invite their friends, neighbours, family, and coworkers.
That Sunday, after publishing the weekly video of the sermon, we made a short video that we also posted on YouTube, inviting anyone in the area to come out.
Five hot plates were donated for our use, although two weren’t the size/shape we needed. This left us with four, including our own. Perfect!
Some of the donated hot plates
4 days before (Wednesday):
We spent several hours distributing about 350 flyers into mailboxes throughout our community.
We like to distribute flyers together, praying for each family as we go
3 days before (Thursday):
Shopping day! We spent hours going to the various stores to pick up food, decorations, serving containers and utensils, and so on. We hit Costco (an hour away) which was a new addition to our shopping repertoire, having opened last summer.
240 eggs at Costco—it was nice that we didn't have to run around to a bunch of grocery stores this year, trying not to clear any one store completely out!
We found Canadian bacon!
2 days before (Friday):
I baked 160 mini muffins: walnut, blueberry, and chocolate chip.
Most of the muffins (C = chocolate, W/K = walnut, B = blueberry)
It took about 6 hours of continuous measuring, mixing, pouring, and so on—using our aforementioned 1-cubic-foot oven, with only 2-minutes’ rest once every hour so that everything kept everything running smoothly.
This day I also made little signs in Japanese for all of the food / garbage disposal / drink stations, and found someone to take pictures of the event.
1 day before (Saturday):
We had a few more items to pick up from the grocery store—perishable things that couldn’t have been purchased on Thursday.
Starting in the early afternoon, we cracked eggs, beating them and mixing in milk and seasonings before double bagging them in large Ziplocs (30 eggs per bag).
All the egg shells!
Next, we rushed over to the church to meet the 10 volunteers who were coming to help us set up.
In preparing the cooking area, we had to re-map all of the church fuses. (In the seven years since our last Easter breakfast, our previous map had gotten lost.)
Fuse map
It was a busy day: taping cords down to minimize tripping hazards. Setting out all the serving dishes and food prep stations.
Cooking zone
Hot drinks zone (we had two kettles going on Easter morning. (Each circuit could only handle one kettle—did that fuse map ever come in handy!)
In previous years, we’d used towel-lined coolers owned by the church to keep food warm as it was waiting to be served. However, sometime in the past seven years, one of the coolers had been discarded. As we searched for an alternate solution, we discovered the church now had a slow cooker—with a “keep warm” setting—fancier than our home one! Phewf! We could work with that...
We put up handmade signs at the front of the church—beautiful works of art created by a close friend seven years ago, and carefully preserved for this next breakfast.
Our friend made about 12 different signs, but we only got a picture of one this time
With our volunteers, we set up the eating areas, complete with tablecloths and bouquets of fake flowers displayed in cute red metal watering cans and terra cotta pots.
One of our centrepieces
Some of the kids volunteered helped create a beautiful chalk sign to greet guests at the welcome table.
Making the sign
How the welcome area finally looked
We headed to bed at 9pm, armed with sleeping pills to make sure we were able to fall sleep despite the early hour.
The day of (Sunday):
We were up at 4:30, and arrived at the church at 5am.
Seaside Chapel at 5am
The first order of business: cooking all the eggs! After that, it was on to the Canadian bacon.
Cooking so many eggs can be strangely hypnotic
Our volunteers began to show up at 6am. They helped with the sausages, cooking the pancakes, and blowing up balloons.
Asato san (the church cook) making sausages
More food prep: fruit and pancakes
The day before, I’d almost forgotten the effect that Okinawan climate has on balloons and started to blow them up then. But one of our friends stopped me with a reminder just as I was getting started. With the heat and humidity, balloons shrivel and shrink, even if they’ve only been inflated over a single night. Our friend’s reminder rescued a key component of our decorations!
As the food prep moved on, we stored the eggs in the cooler, the sausages in the slow cooker, and the bacon in the oven. Pancakes were made on demand, one tray at a time, so they would be as fresh as possible.
Here’s how everything looked on the day of:
Food service at the front of the tables, food prep at the back
And here are some of the people who came:
Some stayed for kids’ Sunday school, and at least one lady (Hiccup) also stayed for the Easter Sunday church service!
