Nine fourth-grade boys can clear a pan of taco meat in about eleven minutes. I didn't mean to time it. I just happened to glance at the clock on the stove when they lined up, and again when Wyatt came in to ask if there was more.
Wyatt turned ten on Sunday, and we had his party Saturday afternoon in the backyard: nine boys from his class and his baseball team, plus family. My mom and Gary drove down from Denton, Kristen and Ryan came with Cody and Avery, and with the five of us that made twenty people. Ron and Debbie called from Tyler in time to hear the birthday song. Storms had been in the forecast all week, and they held off until about nine that night, which I'm counting as one more present.
Setting up the taco bar like a catering line
Three years of catering in Dallas taught me how to set a buffet line, and I set this one up the same way on two folding tables on the patio:
- Plates and napkins
- Hard shells, plus flour tortillas kept warm in a foil packet
- Spanish rice and refried beans
- Seasoned ground beef, kept warm in the Crock-Pot
- Shredded chicken from two Costco rotisserie chickens
- Cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onion and cilantro
- Sour cream and salsa
- Chips and queso at the very end, on their own little table
The catering rule is to put the cheaper, filling things first, so plates are half full before anyone reaches the meat. It works beautifully on wedding guests. It does not work on fourth-grade boys, who walked past the rice and beans as if they were part of the table.
Most of the work happened before anyone arrived. The cake was done Friday night. Saturday morning I chopped every topping into the glass containers with the snap lids and stacked them in the fridge, browned and seasoned the beef at noon and moved it to the Crock-Pot on warm, and shredded the chickens while Matt hosed off the patio. By three o'clock the only job left was melting the queso, which is exactly how a catering kitchen wants a party to start.
What the boys actually ate
- Hard shells with beef and cheese. Nothing green, nothing red. One boy asked if the lettuce was for decoration.
- Chips and queso, gone first. The queso was a block of processed cheese, a can of Rotel and a splash of milk, and the pot was scraped clean before the beef ran out.
- About half the chicken, mostly eaten by the adults. Cody, who plays offensive line, had six tacos and a plate of rice.
- Almost none of the rice and beans, except for Gary, who ate them on purpose to make me feel better.
Eli had a cheese quesadilla, which surprised no one. Rosie, at twenty-one months, had shredded cheese, a torn-up tortilla and a square of cake bigger than her face. Biscuit stole a flour tortilla off the edge of the table in the first five minutes and spent the rest of the party in the laundry room.
The cake
Wyatt asked for Texas sheet cake, which is the right answer to that question. It bakes in a half-sheet pan in about 20 minutes, the fudgy icing goes on while it's still warm, and it cuts into 24 squares that nobody needs a fork for. I left the pecans out of the icing because one of the boys has a tree nut allergy, and his mom checked the cake with me at the gate, which I appreciated. I baked it Friday night after the kids were in bed. Ten candles, one off-key song, and it was gone except for three squares I hid for Matt's lunch.
What it came to
- Meat: 5 pounds of ground beef at $5.29 and two rotisserie chickens, $36.43
- Hard shells and flour tortillas: $7.83
- Rice and refried beans: $5.15
- Cheese, sour cream and salsa: $11.72
- Lettuce, tomatoes, onion, cilantro and limes: $5.12
- Chips and queso: $11.86
- Texas sheet cake: $8.40
- Lemonade mix and two bags of ice: $5.40
- Plates, napkins, forks and candles: $4.09
The total came to $96.00 even, which made the bookkeeper in me unreasonably happy. That's $4.80 a person for twenty.
Not much went to waste. The leftover beef became Frito pie on Monday night, and the chicken and rice turned into burrito bowls on Tuesday. The lettuce, which nobody under eighteen touched, went into salads all week and still didn't run out.
Next year I'd buy half the lettuce and tomatoes, skip the rice entirely and get one more bag of chips. Wyatt had his own suggestion, delivered while he was helping Matt fold up the tables: "Next time just do the meat and the cheese." I'm taking it under advisement.
