Church Salad for 50

The other week the women at our church had a luncheon. I was put in charge of making the salads. "They" thought how could you complicate something so simple. Take the salad out of the bag put it in the bowl, add tomatoes, your done. "They" did not realize the reckless salad maker was in town.

I got to church early, because I take salad duty seriously. I had a news flash run across my mind . People getting sick from packaged salad. Very sick. OH my. Here is my thought process.

1. I don't want people at church getting sick from my salad

2. I should wash all the packaged lettuce just to be sure.

3. I don't wash packaged salad at home.

4. I guess I don't care if my salad makes people sick at home.

Conclusion:

I need to wash the salad at the church so people don't get sick.

So I started looking for a colander. I couldn't find one. So I opened up the bags, filled them with water, poked holes in the bags of lettuce, therefore, letting the dirty water drain out. The Pastor walks in and says what are you doing? Cleaning the dirty pre packaged lettuce. He looked at me like I was crazy. I let the Pastor know if he wants me to cook in the church kitchen I would need to have the proper tools. Just like a guys needs tools for work, so do us gals. So Pastor fixed it. He found one of those aluminum roasting pans poked holes in it with his pen and said ok, here you go, here is a colander. I was happy with that. It was definitely better then the system I had . I dumped all the pre packaged lettuce into the pan and gave it a good bath. All of a sudden a panic set in. How am I going to dry all this? The only towels in the kitchen were these whiter then snow hand towels. I started grabbing them, I rolled the lettuce in the towel squeezing all the excess water out. Unfortunately, two things happened.

1. All the pretty white towels turned a nice shade of rainforest green.

2. When I would open up the towel the lettuce went flying.

Next thing you know I had lettuce on the floor, in the sink, on the window seal, on the counter. Everyplace but the bowl. By this time some of the other ladies were coming in to do their jobs. Each one of them stopped, stared and said what are you doing? I am cleaning the pre packaged salad so no one gets sick. I could tell by the look in their eye they were thinking

Who is this new crazy lady at our church. I did not care. I have a moral obligation to the ladies at the party. My job was to make sure if someone gets salmonella, it would NOT be from the salad. I just ignored them and went about my business, drying pre packaged, washed salad.

I filled up the huge salad bowl with the lettuce that managed to stay in the towels. The lettuce looked beautiful. It almost sparkled.

I guess the lady who did the laundry that day said how in the world did these towels turn green? The result of my actions: I was unofficially banned from the kitchen. Good !!!! When can I go to a party just to enjoy it? As it turns out I was easily forgiven. Darn it! So I bought a colander for the church.

For all those people who thought I was nuts, did you see the headlines yesterday?

"CONSUMER REPORTS: PACKAGED SALAD CAN CONTAIN HIGH LEVELS OF BACTERIA"

:p