Surprise! 40 people for dinner!

Okay... true story.

This morning I woke up at 6:30am and proceeded to get my littlest's diaper changed and bottle fixed. While I am giving him his wake-up bottle I am looking through the emails that showed up in my inbox overnight. One email was from 5:00am - informing me that at my eldest son's boy scout meeting (12 hours from then) there was to be a potluck and the pack leader was asking us (every parent in the pack) to bring a dish if we could.

My first reaction was: What?!?! That's like no notice at all! Good thing I don't have anything else to do today! (note the sarcasm). But then I thought a little longer and figured it wasn't that big of a deal. Afterall, I hadn't seen more than a dozen kids in his pack. So it shouldn't be too hard to whip something up for this Potluck dinner.

So it's 3:15pm (150 minutes until the Potluck) and I go to pickup my little Woodchuck from school. While he is walking up to the car I noticed that his pack leader was parked a couple spaces ahead. I told him to walk over and ask her approximately how many people we should be cooking for. He came back and reported: FORTY. 4-0 PEOPLE!

So we went home and I stared into the cabinets. What do I have on hand that can feed 40 people???
I had to go into the canned good section on my stockpile. I always have an abundance of canned beans so I figured I'd go signature campsite fare. BBQ beans... but that's too boring. I figured maybe I could grab a few packages of hot dogs out of the freezer to cut up and toss in there too. Even more classic campfire fare. Better still... I found 4 packages of John Morrell cocktail smokies that I had bought a couple months ago on a crazy good BOGO sale.

So in all I used:
8 cans Van Kamp's Pork & Beans ($3.20 on sale)
4 pkg John Morrell Cocktail Smokies ($3.38 on sale)
1 cup brown sugar ($.30)
1 cup BBQ sauce ($.50)
couple good shakes of liquid smoke ($.05)

Threw everything in a pot. Cooked through and dumped the contents into (and filled to the brim) two 9x13 disposable pans. BOOM. Dinner for 40 for around $7.43! That's around 18 cents per person!!


This is a prime example of the benefit of having a few key ingredients stockpiled at home!

Not too bad for having little to no time to prepare! ;-)