Mystery Dinner

Hi, this is Trina!

Last night our ward had a "Mystery Dinner" complete with babysitters! Ben and I do not plan dates often enough, so I was looking forward to an enjoyable evening with hubby and neighborhood friends. My first thought when I heard Mystery Dinner was that it would be a who-dun-it sort of evening. I have never participated in one, but they seem like fun, Ben on the other hand was less enthusiastic. I wish I could say that since it wasn't a who-dun-it evening that Ben would have been excited, but just wait!

After strong-arming him into leaving work in the middle of a project to make it to the dinner, we experienced a natural disaster! The lights went off, panic ensued, and the only option left was to salvage our dinner plans from our very own food storage. After being told the rules: nothing from the fridge or freezer, no electricity to make the meal, no lights, and only water from food storage. And only 60 minutes to plan and cook the meal! Meet back here are 8 and we will all eat together. (Just like we thought, only after cooking our own dinners and a whole hour later!)

Well, call us grumpy sports but we were hungry and the guys were less than positive about the possibilities that lay within our pantries. Sure, food storage is great for emergencies, but we thought we were on a date!! Dates and canned spaghetti sauce usually only go over as freshmen in college. :) Fortunately for us we were with a light-hearted group that agreed that in an emergency our first option would be to eat out! So we discussed how to get away with this devious plan and soon we were the only table left! Under the eagle eyes of the planning committee we decided it would be better to finalize out plans out of earshot. (Don't we sound like teenagers here?) On our way out the door a solution came to me! The ladies would indeed do our best and fashion a meal from our collective food storage, while the men went hunting....for takeout!!

After arriving at our decided house we got right to work making a beef stew with canned beef (not as bad as it sounds) beef bouillon dehydrated carrots, dehydrated onions, dehydrated tomatoes, garlic, salt, pepper and chopped potatoes. After realizing that the rubber coated handles of the pot could not go in the BBQ, we headed to another house where they had a gas side burner on their BBQ. Just as we were arriving at the second house, the men returned victorious! Olive Garden Fettuccine Alfredo and breadsticks! We ate while the stew cooked and had a satisfying conversation about disasters, food storage and emergency preparedness. We finished our meal right on time and headed back with our stew to join the rest of the groups. EVERYONE else had made pasta! It was hard to keep a straight face as we sipped at our soup (too full to eat it, although it was actually pretty good) and nibbled our rolls so no one would be suspicious! Our first plan had been to get the take out and bring it back, I guess we would have fit right in! But it was fun to do the project and we did learn some interesting things while we cooked and talked with our group.

So there you have it, even into our 30's we are still making trouble! Of course we were in no way forced to participate, but we didn't really want to seem like bad sports. :) I guess we kind of were, but the pasta was really yummy so I had a hard time feeling too bad about it. And, we really had a great time with our group and are already planning a "reunion" dinner! All in all it was a fun night, but definitely more so because of the company and the enjoyment we had feeling devious! I'm sure everyone else was wondering why we were so cheerful. I guess if they read this they'll know. ;)