By: Kimberly "Mayumi" Coffey
Reality Check:
This is my method. It is not the only method. It may end up looking very little like your method, once you’ve figured out what works for you. This class has been designed based on the experience I’ve had planning feeding the army during the retaking of Darkvale, assisting with the kitchen at Yule, and running the kitchen with Del at Feast of Chimeron 28. It will be fairly easy to take these steps, and apply them to much less intense food planning purposes.
You’re going to need at least four days worth of work before the event, even if the effort is spread out across several weeks. This doesn’t count doing any food preparation beyond shopping, and doesn’t count any time spent on-site arranging it so people can get the food.
Brainstorming & info gathering,
menu decision & ingredient analysis,
Price Check & Math
Shopping
You are going to need to collect money from folks. You may be doing this meal plan FOR FREE: that doesn’t mean the community expects you to do this at a major loss! Do the math so you know how much it will cost to buy ALL of the things required to make this happen. Round up, maybe even add $2 per person, for the last minute stuff. If you’re just running a meal plan and end up collecting a little extra money, it’s OK, ACCEPTABLE, and EXPECTED for you to take this as payment for the effort you put into making sure everyone has food when they’re busy chasing adventure. Put it towards your event cost. If you collect more than a little extra, and you don’t need it to live your life, either bank it specifically for your next bout of feastocrat-ing, or consider paying it forward.
Outline
Decide you want to run a meal plan.
Know your resources
Onsite rules, space, and equipment
Equipment you can borrow
Equipment you own
Equipment you need to buy
Decide what diet restrictions you can reasonably accommodate.
Build a menu plan
Know how many people you are feeding, approximately
Turn your menu plan into a shopping list, based on how many servings you expect to make
Add to the shopping list all disposable or Reusable non-food items you will need.
Price check every item on your shopping list.
Total your costs.
Divide total cost by the number of expected people, to find cost-per person. Round up.
Open registration, collect money.
Set a registration deadline for guaranteed buy in.
Shop
Food Prep
Get everything onsite
Onsite prep and service
Site Cleanup
Information Gathering
See site inventory checklist. What is available, what is allowed, what will you need to bring?
Material Resources
What can you beg and borrow from friends, family, & the community
Tents/awnings, folding tables, camp stove(s), pots & pans, slow cookers, cooking/serving utensils, coolers, drink dispensers, bowls/plates/flatware for serving, cutting boards, measuring cups, oven mitts, dish towels, kitchen knives
Who do you know that has a BJs or Sam's Club membership?
What are you willing to buy
Expect to buy:
tin foil pans, disposable bowls/plates/cups/flatware, dish soap & sponge, paper towels, trash bags, tinfoil, ziplock bags,
Do you need charcoal, firewood or propane?
Are you going to make this a habit? Consider reusable supplies you have the space to store, like large camping coolers.
Consider your limitations
How much cold storage do you have, for storing between
shop ---> prep ---> event?How much prep work can you actually do in your home kitchen?
Do you have a friend with a bigger kitchen who can host prep-day?
How much can you actually transport to and from site
Don’t forget that you need to pack your own gear, too
Call on friends to help transport to and from site
make sure they also know what is their responsibility to transport HOME after the event.
How much of the event content are you willing to skip out on, to make sure your friends are fed?
Grab & go food costs more - either in before-event prep time or cash for pre-made food.
How many people will be helping you, at any stage of the process? Do you have gold to pay them with, can you feed them while they help you?
Have a second in command, just in case,
have a couple people who will show up to prep day
How big are you willing to go?
This course applies best when you are planning to feed quite a crowd, but the basics can be applied to feeding just your cabin of friends.
How much effort are you putting in:
The amount of time and effort you are willing to spend is the second major limiting factor on your menu, but can be balanced against Food Cost - Prepared Food saves time but costs money. Preparing your own food saves money but costs time.Before event
For the sake of finances and food-restriction accessibility, you’re probably going to spend at least one day doing prep work. CALL ON YOUR FRIENDS FOR HELP!
During event
Your menu and workspace will impact the amount of time and effort needed onsite.
How allergen/restrictions conscious are you going to be? See dietary restriction awareness handout.
Decide in advance how many of the FDA major allergen list you are going to limit or avoid all together
Milk/dairy, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nut, peanut, wheat, soy, sesame
What meals are you planning for?
First meal: some folks will never give up their pre-event Dunks Run. Others will be very happy to have food available as soon as they arrive. Still others will show up later in the day. The first breakfast of a weekend is likely going to see less traffic, so plan accordingly.
The Lunch Question: Larpers are used to running on breakfast, snacks, and dinner. It’s not the best for them, though, especially our friends with conditions like Diabetes. A Hearty - but quick - meal for lunch, like burritos or other things resembling sandwiches, is a good option. During peak questing hours, more people will swing by to grab a sandwich-like meal than will take time to sit down with a plate and cutlery.
Exit Meal: The last meal of a weekender is usually during clean up, or just before. If you plan to serve anything, expect to serve the leftovers while you clean everything else up and plan to be one of the last folks off site.
Building a menu.
Maximize Satisfaction, Don’t Chase Perfection
You will NOT please everyone, especially if there’s only one dish per meal on offer. Accept this fact, and aim for ‘maximum number of folks able to eat the food.’
Offering a compile-your-own option like a burrito bar requires more set up effort & serving surface, but is a very good way to offer max variety with a reasonable amount of prep work. Careful layout of the service area will also allow for catering to more food restrictions than a single-pot meal.
Offering a couple options for a sauce - with pulled meat for example - uses only a little extra space and can make a great number of folks very happy. Classic BBQ, Teriyaki/asian, and southwestern/mexican are a good trio that will cover most tastes.
What's Filling?
Protein & high fiber carbs for feeling full
High fiber carbs can be cheap - whole grains, beans, brown rice, oatmeal, lentils
Protein and fiber together is best for feeling full with long term energy.
Refined carbs/sugar are the worst for feeling full, and for long term energy. Dayboard Bread and honey butter is great for keeping your blood sugar up without weighing your stomach down
Nutrition
What’s a Complete Protein? All the building blocks for protein, all in one food.
Complete Alone: quinoa, buckwheat, meat, fish, eggs, dairy, soy/tofu/edamame
Pair em up, pick two:
Whole grain
Seed / nut
Legume / bean
Your friends are probably dehydrated! Be sneaky about hydration:
Melons - watermelon in particular, but really any fruit is good news but not cheap
Veg: cucumber, iceberg lettuce, celery, tomato, etc
Soup, broth, or sauce - more is better. They won’t eat soup at Queen of Hearts unless it’s been pouring, but soup for dinner is a good bet the rest of the year
Salty snacks - these encourage getting a cup of drink for folks who don’t like much veg or fruit. Don’t skimp if you can help it.
What's Cheap?
Prepared food is expensive
Meat is expensive, bacon in particular
Dry bulk grains are cheap
Bulk buying & prep/cooking time can drastically lower overall costs.
Save Money: Buy Fewer Ingredients
Planning to use the same main ingredients as much as possible will save you both shopping time and money. Changing up the seasoning/flavor helps avoid monotonous food over a long weekend.
Look into “Batch Cooking” tips and menus for ideas. Batch bulk cooking is designed as a cook-in-advance method for a single person or small family, but blogs will often have good suggestions for a series of meal options that mostly share the same ingredients.
Reigning in the over-eager
How much you actually need: https://www.chef-menus.com/food-quantity-chart.html
This is something I personally still struggle with. You’re going to either throw food away, or hear complaints about there not being enough. In general, folks will eat less when it’s extremely hot out or they need to eat quickly and get back to the action. Conversely, if the questing was heavy and there’s a long enough dinner break, people will eat for what they missed at lunch and then some.
Plan your prepwork as you plan your menu
Be aware of what will reheat well, what space you have on site to store refrigerated & frozen food safely, what space you have for on site prep work, & how much cooking/heating space you have to use at any one time. Label each recipe: make & freeze, make (1-3 days) in advance, or prep & cook onsite.
A Gantt Chart is a workflow visualization that shows what is being worked on, in what location, at what time. It can easily be adapted to plan what dish is being cooked or prepared, in what kitchen location, at a given time - so that everything is ready at approximately the time you want it to be served.
Please learn from my mistakes. You may not need a full gantt chart for your meal plan or feast, but have an awareness of what time you should start preparing, cooking, and serving each dish - with extra time for inefficiencies. Print and pack three copies, and some tape.
Gaining & Gauging Attention
Unfortunately, running an actual feast/event kitchen instead of a meal plan means you have to skip this step. Instead, you must set a deadline for registration of dietary restrictions, and work with your EH team to estimate attendance.
Write up your planned menu, including the allergens you plan on entirely avoiding.
Decide how to collect interest information and demographics. I use google forms - make sure to set it to NOT require a google sign in.
Collect: how sure they are about their attendance, which meals they will be on site for, which foods from the menu they will/won’t eat, their dietary restrictions, and possibly what price point they are willing/able to buy in at.
Set an interest-gathering deadline, with enough time to do the rest of the work you’ll need to do.
Tell everyone you’re committed to running a meal plan, ask everyone to fill out the interest survey.
Close the survey after the deadline. You now should have an idea of numbers, so you can do volume and cost estimates.
Be aware that not everyone will reply to an interest survey, especially if you are not annoyingly loud about it. For Divine Intervention 2, I saw 50 responses to the interest survey and ended up buying and cooking food for 75.
Price checking & budgeting
Multiply your serving sizes/recipes based on expected headcount
List out each ingredient you need, and how much - ie: if you are using the same dry white rice in several dishes, combine amounts so you know you need 10 cups total
Take some time to convert these into the measurements that the ingredient is generally sold in: you can’t buy 15 cups of diced onions, but googling “cups onion diced per lb whole” will tell you that 2 cups is about 1 pound whole onions. A bit of math: half of 15 means you need 7.5 lbs of whole onions.
Plan for all disposable items you need to purchase, and add them to your shopping list. Include reusable items that you need, too.
Price check everything.
Note down the store, package size, price, and how many packages you need.
Use amazon, instacart, and the online order-for-pickup websites of the supermarkets local to you, to quote the price
Round up at least to the .50 or $1 mark.
If one store has a drastically lower price on something, Mark down the second-best price instead, and make a note of where it was cheapest on the side. Price check these items again when you’re at the store
Total the entirety of your expected costs, divide by the number of people you are expecting to feed: this is your price per person.
Round up to a number that’s easy to pay in cash (change is a waste of time - instead of $32.85 call it $35)
Registration!
This section is again aimed at meal plans. For a propper feast, you and the rest of the event team should make sure to release a detailed dietary reg form, and may decide to offer flex pricing.
At a minimum, collect: contact information, name both IC & OOC, dietary restrictions and allergies, what meals they expect to be onsite and need food for.
Financial Assistance Options: our community is a giving and caring one. As part of your registration, you may choose to collect info on who requires assistance. Also ask if folks are willing to pay for “one, two, or as many as necessary” sponsored slots. Once registration is closed, you can tally up how much dollar value “financial assistance” was requested, and reach out, fairly, to those who are willing to give based on the registrations you received.
Keep quiet about who asks, and who gives. The community at large has no need to know personal financial information like this, and you are being trusted to keep quiet about it.
Set a deadline -
registration, diet restriction registration, and payment deadlines can be separate days.
Plan your public deadlines a few days in advance of your actual deadlines - it allows for last-minute or forgetful folks to buy in slightly after the fact.
Prepare your payment methods
Paypal and Venmo will make up the bulk of your buy-ins. Some folks will only be able to pay cash on site.
Let everyone know about it, collect information and money. Crow about it once a week, at different times and days. Make sure to remember “last chance today” messages.
Final non-food prep
Check your estimates against how many people actually registered. Bulk purchasing power means that you generally won’t be paying more per person to add on more servings, but even if prices go up you should still have wiggle room from rounding up the ticket price. Adjust your recipe totals, ingredient totals, and price checks accordingly.
Check that you can feed everyone who registered: many of the folks with dietary restrictions will make a point to reach out early, but some may have forgotten or had their schedule clear up for the event date. Consider what you could change about the prep of your existing menu to safely serve any late-comers: buying something specifically should be a last resort, but is sometimes necessary. Don’t forget to add these changes to your recipe notes, and extra items to your shopping list.
Time for a timing plan! You should now know what, and how much, you are going to need to prep, cook, plate, and serve. Reconsider your plan to skip the gantt chart. At least write out a timing list: week before event & freeze recipes, 3 days out recipes, 2 days out recipes, day before prep work, onsite prep work and cooking in order with timestamps. Print out all your recipes, and write the deadline and target start time on them.
Shopping
Plan for you, or someone, to stop on the way to site for things like fresh bread - place the order at least a few days out, and call to confirm the day before. Plan for your shopping expedition to take at least twice the time you think it will. Bring someone with you, if you can. Pack a cooler in your car for the cold stuff to go right into - maybe 2 for fridge & freezer items - so you can go to multiple stores in one outing. Plan to go to at least one of the stores twice, just in case the price on something has spiked or you missed an item.
Sort your ingredient/volume/source/price spreadsheet in a way that makes the most sense to your brain. Mine is usually by location, then by supermarket aisle/category. Print it out, make sure you can read it easily. Bring a pen - bonus points if it’s got more than one color ink.
While you’re at the store, check prices against your sheet. Even for items that are listed to be bought in other stores. If it’s about the same or lower than your price-check data, go ahead and buy it. If it’s a lot higher, highlight it and check the price at the next store.
Food Prep
The best way to learn about feast prep, is to make the time and show up when someone needs food prep help. See a feast on the calendar, or even any event with food? Reach out to the listed feastocrat, and ask if they need help for prep day (usually the day before the event).
Label EVERYTHING, label clearly, and do not use shorthand that your kitchen help can’t understand at a glance.
Almost everything that can be cooked on the stovetop can also be cooked in the oven - a google search will tell you how
The community is good about pitching in to help prep a meal plan or feast, but expects a few things from you in return:
Clearly set expectations about when, where, and how much help you need.
The Call is made in advance, so they can plan their time
A meal is included. Don’t let your friends get hangry.
You remind them. Repeatedly. 2 weeks out, a week out, and the day before. The Executive Dysfunction is real.
Getting Everything To Site
Stage everything the night before, piled neatly by the front door or in the garage. Have everything that’s still in the fridge and freezer in one pile, clearly visible. Have a list of the things that will be packed in coolers, to check against in the morning
Departure time: budget for
The drive itself
Traffic delays (holiday weekends especially)
A pit stop & stretch break (if drive is more than ~45 min)
Grabbing a meal or a coffee
20 minutes at the store for that thing you forgot, plus ice
Time to stop for the bread order, if it’s not been delegated
Transport Assistant Arrival Time: (work back from departure)
Time to bring everything outside
Time to make sure you have everything (15 minute inventory, 15 of scrambling around the house for what you missed)
Time to actually pack the car(s)
Extra time to take half of it out and repack. 3d tetris is a skill you may not have mastered.
Wake Up time: (Work back from assistant arrival)
The time it takes for you to get from alarm to ready to drive (if you weren’t bringing the whole kitchen)
Snooze time, if you’re the type
Time to pack the coolers
Does this seem excessive? Maybe. But something is very likely to go a little wrong, or take longer than planned. It’s better to be early than late, especially if you’re bringing all the food.
Always have a backup vehicle on deck - someone who either lives nearby, or has to drive past your area on the way to site - who you can call on in the event you can’t cram everything into the planned number of cars. If any of the folks who helped bring things to the event won’t be staying until the bitter end, make sure you have someone else lined up to help bring everything home. Yes, a lot of the volume of food will disappear into stomachs, but there is still all the gear to bring home.
On Site Prep & Service
Nothing will teach you more about how a feast kitchen can be run, than working in a feast kitchen. Reach out in advance to the feastocrat, and explain your skill level. Don’t expect direct mentorship while working in someone else’s kitchen - expect to be assigned tasks that are within your skill level, and possibly even boring. Keep your eyes open and observe how everything is set up. Observe how tasks are handed out and handled. How the ingredients are organized and stored. What foods have been prepared in advance, how they are transported and labeled, how they are reheated. If there is a lull in the activity - hurry up and wait doesn’t just apply to fighters - then you can ask questions about your observations.
Site Clean Up
Plan to be one of the last three people to leave the event site.
If you cannot promise that, you will need to have a second in command who can stay until the kitchen is fully cleaned.
Cleaning the kitchen will take, at absolute minimum, an hour.
A bigger feast, or a longer event, will mean a longer clean up time.
Don’t plan to serve any food during the clean up time,
plan to finish at least an hour before the event site closes -
you’re going to run late during the clean up.
Have several people who know it’s going to be their job to help clean to the bitter end. Hopefully, these are the same people who will be helping transport your gear home.
Dishwasher
Dish dryer
Someone to pack into bins
Someone to carry bins to the parking lot
You will throw out more food than anyone sane wants to see go into the garbage.
Plan on having a “take me” table. Set this up as soon as the last food has gone out.
Nonperishables are easy to convince friends to take home,
leftovers will travel, mostly, if you provide containers of some sort.
Make friends with someone who keeps small livestock. Offer them free animal feed, so long as they stay late to collect it.