Dr. Hbar » Student Open House

We invited all my students over the weekend before exams for an open house. We planned to have warm comfort foods on hand for the students to eat as they were able to drop by. Overall, it went really well. I’m learning that one of the cooking skills I don’t have is cooking for a crowd, but I’m getting better and want to record my menus here for future reference.

We made the following:

Chili (the picture above is not mine – I forgot to take any pictures)
Cheddar corn chowder
Homemade oreos
Hot chocolate
My mother’s Russian tea (recipe below)

There were some hits and misses. The soups worked out fine, but we realized we didn’t have pots big enough for the quantities we wanted to make. So I went to Kohl’s and got a huge 16 qt stainless steel stock pot. Together with our stainless steel dutch oven it was enough, and now we’ll have a better pot for making stock. I doubled the homemade oreos recipe and something went wrong with the butter to flour ratio; the cookies were too buttery. The hot chocolate curdled in the crock pot. But the chili and Russian tea were big hits.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user 46137]

Russian Tea

Yield: about four gallons

Ingredients:

2 gallons water
4 family size tea bags
juice of 1 lemon
2 cans of frozen orange juice concentrate
2 cans Dole pineapple juice (you probably could use any brand, but my other insists that it should be Dole and I'm afraid to try anything else)
3 cinnamon sticks
1 Tbs cloves
sugar to taste

Directions:

Brew tea, as usual, with the water and tea bags. Add other ingredients and let simmer for at least one hour.