Spaghetti Supper for 90 guys at Billy Brumfield House

About four times each year, our Sunday School class at Church provides an evening meal for the Billy Brumfield House – a shelter for homeless men, located at 1244 South Gallatin in Jackson, MS. We have a large class of mostly retired folks and this is something we do.

The Billy Brumfield House provides 2 or 3 meals a day, overnight housing and counseling services for 80-90 homeless men, with psychological, alcohol, PTSD and drug problems. Food is provided by a number of generous groups and individuals in our area.

Over the times we have cooked for Billy Brumfield, our class has served the guys lasagna, fried chicken, meatloaf, hamburger steaks, sandwiches, vegetable beef soup, chili, BBQ, and other meals – always supper, with leftovers that are added to lunch the next day. We do an entrée, one or two simple vegetables, usually a green salad, bread, dessert and soft drinks. We are not on a nutrition crusade, but we never serve junk food.

We are not skilled quantity cooks, so I guess our offerings are somewhat limited. Never have received any complaints from the good folks who run the shelter, and I have never seen any food on the plates after the guys eat.

Once, during my absence from here, the wife (MHNBPF) and I agreed to provide the spaghetti for the guys at Brumfield’s one night. Our church has a commercial stove, convection oven and a tilting braising pan, but it seemed easier to cook it in our kitchen rather than at church, so we did it at home. I understand School Lunch room cooks do this in bigger quantities than we cooked every day but, other than serving KP a few times during Army basic training, it was not something I am accustomed to doing. In case a time comes when you need to make spaghetti for 100 folks, I thought I’d share what we did.

Before I start, I need to make certain everyone here understands the wife, who has a degree in Nutrition and was once the Director of the child nutrition program for the State of Mississippi (all school lunch programs and child nutrition programs) was the project’s working supervisor (Head Chef and Chief Cook) and I was a somewhat competent helper (assistant line cook).

For 90+ servings we used:

10 pounds ground beef
2 #10 cans of crushed tomatoes
1 #10 can of tomato sauce
6 cans of tomato paste
6 cups onion, diced
4 cups Green Bell Pepper, diced
6 Tablespoons Lawry’s garlic salt
2 Tablespoons Black Pepper
1 cup Tones Italian Spaghetti Seasoning (not bad stuff)
5 Tablespoons Oregano (to supplement the Tones)
5-6 cups Parmesan Cheese
Olive oil
Salt
4 pounds of spaghetti

Directions:

Do the prep on the onions and green bell peppers (The results are shown in ingredients needed photos)

Brown off the ground beef. We used a turkey roaster and one other pan to brown the beef.

Add the onions, black pepper, and Lawry’s Garlic salt.

Add the green bell pepper.

Separate the beef into three pans and portion out the crushed tomatoes.

final shot after portioning:

Portion the tomato paste into the three pans

final shot after tomato paste

Add the Italian Spaghetti Seasoning

Reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 1 hour, then add Parmesan cheese to each pan

Hold at heated stage (just at/below simmer). Since we planned to hold the sauce for at least another hour, we made sure the temperature remained in a safe food range

In an appropriately sized pan, with salted water, we cooked the spaghetti in 2 pound batches (4 total).

Since we needed to hold the spaghetti for an hour after completion, we pulled it at less than the al dente stage.

Our intent was to hold and serve the finished spaghetti in aluminum pans, so from here on out, everything was portioned to end up with 4 pans (held in our oven until we left for a twenty minute drive to Billy Brumfield’s).

Spaghetti is portioned into a mixing pan,

then sauced until the amount of sauce looks right.

Then mixed

and placed into the aluminum pan.

We had a lot of sauce left over, so we portioned extra sauce over each pan of finished spaghetti

Then sealed the pans with foil

and held them (At safe food serving temperature) in the oven before leaving for the homeless shelter.

Just before we left. I think we added a little pasta water to help with the liquid consistency the wife wanted.

Other class members provided bread, canned peas (salad – not shown - already on the tables), soft drinks and cupcakes or iced chocolate cake. Here are some of the 90 dished plates we wound up serving at the Billy Brumfield Shelter that night.