Cooking for a crowd can be overflowing fun and bliss. Or it can be the most embarrassing event of your life.

In my last blog post, I showed you how we cooked for the open house at Cold Springs Garden Center. Today I want to share a few tips on planning ahead when cooking for a crowd. These are based on principles I have learned in our own cooking for open houses, church picnics, and reunions.

Lack of planning is a leading cause for despair in catering. Get your ducks lined up and don’t try to warp time. If you are careless in this point, you are asking reality to dump buckets of stress upon your head. Planning involves fire management, lining up supplies, and preparing enough food for the crowd. I can’t go into much detail on these points today, but you can use these simple tips as a guide for success in catering.

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A couple weeks ago, we had a lot of fun cooking for Open House at Cold Springs Garden Center, the other company Marlin owns with my Dad. The event lasted two days, Friday and Saturday. We served homemade donuts and coffee in the mornings. Around 10:30 we started giving away grilled sausage sandwiches and barbecue samples.

In this post, I want to share some of the memories from those two days and entice you with ribs, wings, chicken, and Amish-made sausage from Lancaster County, PA.

We grilled the sausages on a BBQ42 Chicken Cooker. For samples, we grilled party wings with the sausage and smoked ribs (how growling delicious!) and split chicken breasts on my Meadow Creek SQ36 Smoker.

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Do you cook on a Meadow Creek cooker, love photography, and run on barbecue? Here is your chance to get rewarded for your photography skills. Meadow Creek is running their first ever photo contest and the grand prize is pretty juicy. I know we have some good photographers in our customer family, and would really love to see our customers win this contest. 🙂

Deadline for submissions: June 12.

Here is a list of the prizes:

Grand Prize: Photo will be printed on the cover of the 2012 Meadow Creek catalog along with name and location. Photo may be used in other advertising or marketing efforts. Winner will receive a $500.00 gift certificate redeemable at any Meadow Creek dealer toward any Meadow Creek equipment, accessory, or supply.

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Last week Meadow Creek had their annual dealer meeting and Open House. Marlin and I always make sure we’re there for the dealer meeting and at least part of the open house.

It was absolutely great being there again. I came home with some new inspiration, as well as confirmations of things I need to be doing to sell more Meadow Creek equipment. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t promote schemes that trick people into buying our smokers and grills. I’ll leave that for the schematic tricksters who are content with forcing people to make decisions.

My goal is to educate the people in my market and help them achieve their goals. One of those goals is to grill chicken for events, such as fund-raisers, auctions, open houses, weddings, etc. Not just grill chicken, but chicken that is perfect from head to toe. Fully cooked on the bone, but not dried out on the surface. Cooked uniformly from east to west, north to south. Not just perfect chicken, but huge amounts of it.

Does this sound like your dream? Meadow Creek chicken cookers make it easy as pie to grill perfect chicken for hundreds. It was fun to see it done again last week.

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I love working in the office. Tech and the skill of writing, designing, and marketing. Hey, sitting here writing this blog post to feed my family is just wonderful. Especially, when many other people are working in lonely cubicles or doing things they hate. I am very blessed.

Where am I going with this? While I love working indoors, nothing can beat the outdoors this time of the year. Dogwoods, azaleas, and flowers blooming. Green grass, awesome weather, and leaves on the trees. More daylight in the evenings. Spending time outside with the family.

My backyard is still far from ideal, but at least it’s a backyard. It would be fun to have a spacious deck, open patio, nice even lawn, and beautiful landscaping, but what’s far more important is my family and taking time to enjoy each day.

We can have such high ideals, we miss the possibilities right under our noses. For example, I really enjoy fire rings. Roasted hot dogs, smores (with chocolate and peanut butter!), and fire talks. But for a long time I did without a fire ring because I had things to do with my money besides spending it on fancy landscaping bricks. You know the kind that works really good for a fire ring.

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For as long as I can remember, homemade pizza and barbecue have been very special to me. We NEVER in all my growing up years had enough homemade pizza or grilled burgers to satisfy my cravings. My mom absolutely was and still is a great cook, but for some reason, we didn’t get around to firing up the grill every two days and having pizza every Friday night. You know how it goes. Life is practical, not always full of pizzazz.

Okay, so getting down to my point, if you want to really discover your favorite food, try combining two of them. Depending how you do it, the result will either be mental pizzazz—or possibly mental shock. By the way, I am certainly NOT talking about slapping hamburgers on top of pizza dough and squirting a little ketchup and mustard.

Here’s a sneak peak of what I mean:

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