Fiesta Food for Zeke's Graduation Party

In the style of King Arthur Flour's website, I'm going to post more pictures and notes of the food I made than you probably care to read. I had never cooked for so many people before, so it was quite an ordeal! We were expecting over 100! Now, I was not solely responsible for the food; the other families provided hot dogs and hamburgers, vegetable trays, coleslaw, and cake and ice cream, too. But I was solely responsible for all of the Chamorro fiesta food. I practiced making the chicken, red rice and pancit before leaving Guam. Earlier this week I created a huge shopping list, comparing all the recipes and double checking to make sure I had everything. Mom did all of the shopping and even enlisted the help of a couple of Asian ladies to find the canton noodles I needed. The pile of groceries on our counter was quite amazing.

All the soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil. Our kitchen has never seen so much soy sauce!

On Thursday, I spent over 4 hours chopping vegetables and slicing the meat. My wrist got so tired, I had to finish the meat on Friday. I cut 8 1/2 pounds of beef into 1/8 inch strips (or close to 1/8 inch strips--I did not measure!). This is the cooler full of vegetables. I cut them to specification, split the vegetables for each recipe into bags and labeled them, so I wouldn't get confused on Friday. This system worked pretty well. On Friday, I cooked all of the rice, bagogi, and pancit. The links lead to the recipes I used. I also added notes about my variations. The fried rice turned out great! I had never made it before, but it was really easy and had a nice flavor.

Nate helped me by slicing the chicken and making the marinade for the chicken. (My wrist was still really tired and he was being a gentleman.)

Here's all of the meat marinating in the refrigerator. For those who cook for a lot of people all the time, it probably doesn't look like much, but for me, it was pretty impressive. Look at all those onions! Both marinades call for tons of onion. You can use this marinade for any type of meat, but chicken is probably the most common. You can grill the meat or broil it, as I did, because there wasn't enough grill space. The red rice also turned out well. Yum! Note: red rice tastes much better if you cook it on the day you're going to serve it, instead of cooking it the day before and warming it up; however, the flavor is still pretty bland. I was really excited about the bagogi--also spelled bulgogi or bulgoki. The flavor is excellent! I especially love the sesame flavoring and the meat is tender. The picture does not do the food justice; bagogi tastes much better than it looks. The pancit was a little more tricky this time than when I made it the first time. I realized later that we had dried canton noodles made of wheat flour. On Guam, I cooked with fresh egg noodles, which cooked much faster than the dried noodles. If you make the pancit with dried noodles, cook the noodles first before adding them to the vegetables. Speaking of vegetables, I put in quite a bit more than the Guamanian recipes I found. I love the bright colors and felt like part of this meal needed to have some vegetables other than onion in it.