Pancakes and Breakfast Meat

Last week we hosted the basketball 5th quarter at our church.  If you don't know what that is, basically we invite any teenager we can find to come have some free food, play some games and win some prizes at our church after a home game. For some people, this sounds like the worst way to spend a Friday night, for us, it's the best!  In our ministry, basketball 5th quarters are known to have breakfast food and a good give away.

I handle all of the menu making and food prep for all of our ministry endeavors.  I have a tendency to go a little over board with the details, and every time I try to make it a little better than the last time.  So, normally we do pancakes, milk and juice at these kinds of things.  This year I get this great idea to add breakfast meat, chocolate chips, blueberries, strawberries and whipped cream.  So, I took care of getting nearly all of the ingredients donated and got some help lined up.  What I forgot to do was allow for the time to cook the meat.  Since we've done just the pancakes for a few years now, I thought I had the timing down to an art.  But, alas, I was far from having it right.  So, as the eighty hungry teenagers were arriving we were still in the middle of cooking the meat and hadn't even started the pancakes yet - mistake #1.  Lucky for me, teenagers aren't big on punctuality!  Thankfully, I had great help and pancakes cook really fast. I'm probably giving a painful amount of detail - I'll try to stop. If you're interested in how much ingredients are necessary to feed this many people, I'll post it for you to help you avoid some of the guess work I have.

So, although what's going on in the kitchen is really exciting to me, here's what was going down in everyone else's world at this time.  Whenever we plan an event we make sure there is something for every type of student.  For the athletes and/or people who can have fun doing anything and don't mind embarrassing themselves we had a gotcha contest and free-throw contest.  For everyone else, we had a coloring contest.  We also have a drawing for other prizes so everyone has an equal chance at getting something good.  Here's my advice; don't spend a lot of money on prizes for contests, you'll just end up with people having hurt feelings because they didn't win. The only things we really spend money on are the prizes for the drawings. Also, have a child judge the coloring contest (for the same before mentioned reason).  We do the drawings at the very end and gather the students for a gospel presentation before. I say we, but really my husband does this.

5th Quarter by the numbers:
1 large (sam's size) bag of krusteaz pancake mix.  I stick with the just add water for simplicity
1 bag of choc. chips
1 can of blueberries
1 gal. milk
2 gal. orange drink
8 lbs of sausage (it was a little too much)
10 lbs of bacon (again, a little too much)
2 containers frozen strawberries
1 can of whipped cream
3-4 bottles of syrup

One bag of choc. chips is enough for 4 C. of pancake mix
I used 1/2 can of blueberries for 4 C. mix
If you like hot syrup, I emptied 3 bottles into a crock pot and turned it on high 1 hr before serving

I hope someone can use these ideas and I would love to hear how you would make this better!