Wanted: holiday meal ideas that don't need knives to eat

[dullard]

My wife and I buy, cook, and serve food for the poor once per month (the focus is the working poor, but there are also lots of retired people with bad teeth). We only serve meals that we eat ourselves and are delicious, made ourselves, and usually not too unhealthy. It can be anything we want, but we usually serve chicken, turkey, ground beef, or the occasional vegetarian dish (since it is expensive to buy ~150 meals of more expensive meats and we avoid pork products due to the large numbers who can't eat them for religious reasons).

Next month our day ends up being on Christmas Eve. So, I was trying to come up with something special to cook. I want to go all out. So, I was thinking of serving nice steaks rather than our typical chicken, turkey, or ground beef. But then I realized for safety reasons that there are no knives of any kind in the facility (other than chef's knives for cooking). So serving a steak and only having a spoon/fork to eat it with would soon turn out to be a disaster.

Can you think of any festive, more special (but obviously not extravagant like wagyu) meals to serve? It also has to be something that a small group (we will likely have some high-school volunteers helping to cook) can reasonably cook in about 2 hours. I was thinking steak salads where we can pre-cut the meat, but that isn't quite festive enough.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Sound delicious hearty beef stew would probably fit the bill.

Use good pieces of diced up beef. Brown the meat on the pan for a bit, then stick in in the big pot for the rest of the time. Ideally you'd have more time for the food to cook in the pot, but, you could certainly make a decent stew in 2 hours.

Otherwise, you could do some stir fried steak medallion type dish, or there's always carne-asada steak tacos ...

Or .. how about hot roast beef or italian beef sandwiches?

 

[Anubis]

yea a hearty stew with mashed potatoes. or a pot roast would work

you could do a ham as well, slice it thin enough yo serve and you can easily cut it with a fork to eat

 

[Drako]

Turkey dog corndogs.

 

[dullard]

Thanks for the suggestions. Chili keeps coming up as an idea; beef stew would be along those lines. It should work. But I think I like the carne-asada taco idea better. They do like it when we serve ground beef tacos or nachos.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Lasagna,

 

[zinfamous]

Brisket, if you you slice and serve it first, would require no knives, and is fall-apart yummy. And you can do it cheaply by using chuck which, frankly, is pretty awesome.

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/08/sous-vide-barbecue-smoked-bbq-brisket-texas-recipe.html

Now, unless you have enough sous vide devices to prepare enough briskets for 150 meals (that's around 70lbs of meat?), and/or a smoker to handle the rest, I'd suggest cooking them in the oven at ~220 for 8? hours each or so, and maybe use some liquid smoke in the recipe to get the nice smokey flavor.

....Isn't brisket one of the classic christmas dishes, anyway?

 

[Carson Dyle]

Steak fajitas.

Seems to me that even though you want it to be special, Christmas Eve might be one of the worst days to deviate from a more traditional Christmas meal. Like turkey and fixins. I'm not sure anyone is going to recognize chili (or fajitas) as special just because they have steak as a component.

 

[ponyo]

That's tough. If I was doing it, I would just smoke some briskets or shoulder clods at home and slice/serve there. But if you must prepare and cook everything there, 2 hours won't be enough time to do anything like that. If you want to stick with meat, you could something like grilled beef and chicken kebobs. That's something easy to grill and cook. But 150 servings is lot to cook in 2 hours unless you have lot of grills. Or you could do large pans of lasagna. Tacos are easy as are cheese steaks especially if you have big restaurant size griddle. You can also cook chicken and steaks on the griddle and slice/cube it and serve it with fried rice. There's nothing that says you have to give the meat to them in one large piece.

 

[deadlyapp]

Zin hit something I was going to recommend - tri-tip. Cooks up large and then can be easily sliced and used to make sandwiches and if smoked / cooked slow usually falls apart pretty well.

 

[dullard]

Tri-tip was requested once by a client. I haven't worked with it but like to experiment.

The facility has a large brazier that I usually use for the cooking. http://www.catererspartyrentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tilting-skillet-brazier.jpg They also have a bit of gas stove-top space and lots of convection ovens. Unfortunately, grilling (no grill) and slow roast brisket (the place serves lunch too so they have to clear out before we can get it) aren't really options. Plus, our families will be even more mad at us if we took even more of Christmas Eve time up.

It has been over a year since we served lasagna. That might be the fallback option.

 

[Kaido]

Crack chicken is pretty great. Serve it up a bun so it's hand-held. It's almost like an Alfredo version of pulled pork, but with shredded chicken, cream cheese, ranch dressing powder, bacon crumbles, and cheese on top. Very easy to make in the crockpot: (or Instant Pot)

https://cookiesandcups.com/slow-cooker-crack-chicken/

If you need a large tool & have a budget available, they sell 14-quart GoWise electric pressure cookers for $130. Also useful when you need to cook, say, 10 pounds of chili, or an entire turkey at once:

https://www.amazon.com/GoWISE-USA-GW22637-4th-Generation-measuring/dp/B01LVZY19H/

The crack chicken freezes well too & can be reheated easily with good results, so if only have a regular crockpot or two, you can start making batches now and just heat them up on-site (ex. thaw the ziploc or vac-sealed bags the night before, then ask people to bring in their crockpots & set on warm/low mode to bring them up to temp).

 

[Kaido]

Cheesy potato casserole (aka "funeral potatoes") makes a great side:

https://lilluna.com/funeral-potatoes/

You can use scalloped potatoes, hash browns, or mini-cubed potatoes (aka Southern-style hash browns). The nice thing about this dish is that you can buy frozen hash browns & make them ahead of time in those 50-cent disposable foil 8x8" or 9x13" containers, so all you have to is thaw & bake them on the day.

 

[BoomerD]

You're welcome.

 

[ctbaars]

Tacos Pizza

 

[sdifox]

Pulled pork?

 

[renz20003]

chicken cordon bleu

 

[Darwin333]

Crack chicken is pretty great.

Everything is better with crack.

 

[Kaido]

Everything is better with crack.

In all seriousness, crack chicken is awesome tho

 

[Slew Foot]

No pork and no knives for safety.....

Are cooking food at Guantanamo?

 

[tynopik]

Lasagna,

yup

 

[Red Squirrel]

Can't have Christmas dinner without turkey and ham! Maybe it can just be precut in bite size pieces before served? Though that adds a lot of work on the people prepping/serving it.

Lasagna is a good idea too, that and tourtiere, and any foods that you can easily cut with a fork. Though will it just be plastic forks or metal? Even turkey you could kinda cut with a metal fork if those will be provided so it could still be an option.

Can also have Christmas cookies as desert to make it more christmassy even if the meal itself is not.

Pizza might also be an option, put lots of green and red peppers.

 

[John Connor]

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've been told if you send that to a PCB manufacturing company they send you circuit boards.

 

[John Connor]

IDK. I had to eat that crap when I was like 10 for a few days for a lower GI I had done at the hospital. OMG my life sucked so bad. Wouldn't even let me take my GI Joe into the procedure room.