Behind the Scenes- Feast of Folkestone

I hope you enjoy this peek behind the scenes at the work involved in throwing Feast of Folkestone.  Sorry if the length of this piece seems excessive, but it reflects the massive scale of the event and the many many  people who contribute.- Angela "Phoenix" Gray



Wednesday- Our fridge cleaned out awaiting the onslaught of food.  The second shelf has things we'd planned to use for the feast.  The remainder was what we hoped to keep of our food.














Our 5 page shopping list. Jason input recipes into the app, Paprika,
which compiled what we needed into a master list.  Items of note include 30 pounds of butter, 40 onions, 10 dozen eggs, 6 pounds of cocktail shrimp, 90 chicken breasts, 50 pounds of beef brisket and 25 pounds of pork loin (I should note here that as those who were at Folkestone questing know, we ended up with lots of extra food.  I was raised by a grandmother who showed love by feeding people and considered not having enough for guests the ultimate in failure.  It may have led to me encouraging Jason to over shop).








Shopping trip #1 to BJ's. Took 2 hours to shop.














The fridge post shopping, once we threw out the rest of our food and removed a couple shelves everything just fit.  It turned out to be fortunate that BJ's only had 1/2 the brisket we needed, otherwise we would have had to have broken out coolers.

Wednesday also included making dough for 18 dozen cookies, grating 25 cups of cheese, and boiling 3 dozen eggs (as well as repeatedly cleaning the kitchen).  In addition Bonita, jazzed up our menu with art work Wed.















The day also included a second shopping trip to Market Basket for the non-perishables BJ's didn't have.







There were some breaks from feast prep to work on items for Folkestone Questing.














Thursday-  Prep included making and baking 31 mini loaves of vanilla corn bread, baking 18 dozen cookies, roasting 12 sweet potatoes, as well as making humus and olive tapenade.






Auction items also were made, and costumes too!!








Friday- Finally we were packed and set to go
















The day of the feast there were 9 Folkestone cooks in the kitchen.  We made 10 appetizers, 3 soups, 3 main dishes, 4 sides, and a LOT of dessert.

We also recruited some of our friends to help with the cooking.

As you can tell it was lots of work, and the above doesn't even include the casino staff (thanks Zula and Co.) , the 8 servers, people making sure drinks were made, our amazing volunteer crew of dishwashers (thanks Steve and Owen!!), and our large and thorough awesome clean up crew.

While it was lots of work we were happy to do it and managed to have some fun along the way (and hope all our guest did too).