HEAVENLY CHURCH SHINDIGS NEED A LITTLE HELL

By Foodie Adventurer

Feather-fluffy pancake breakfasts!  Fresh fish-fry Fridays!  Sinful baked-good sales!  Hot off-the-hog pig pickin’s!  Supper Saturday suppers!  Chuck-wagon chili parties!  Bodacious barbecues!  Bring it on…Baby Cakes!  When you mention church, food, and fundraising, the holy trinity of blessed good eating, I would be jolted out of the humdrum of family meals and eagerly leave the food preparations to the good ladies of a local church, knowing the meal would be happily homemade, especially delicious, and a great budget-saving value in an atmosphere of welcoming energy and friendliness.

Sadly, it seems the days of paradise eats is going the way of landlines and quiet libraries.  I know these are church functions, so maybe “bad” is out of place here, but folks I want bad barbecue and chili…as in good-as-hell exciting and stimulating to my senses.  No offence to angels, but I yearn for the salacious, kick-ass church-food fundraisers of a by-gone era.

I don’t expect fancy.  In fact, I get good vibes as I step out of my car onto crunchy gravel, dried-up weeds, and something that could have been grass.  To me this is a true, down-home sign of a place that’s goin’ to offer a Brother or Sister some lip-smackin’, tooth-pickin’, belly fillin’, praise-the-lord best homemade goodness around, beside my mom’s.

When, however, walking through the parking lot is pretty much the high point of a church event, one has to face the truth that things are amiss with God’s family on earth, at least in their kitchen.  When you have to poke around, trying to find the entrance, this is not a good sign. 

Well-planned events want people to find the entrance.  Well-planned events put out balloons and signage and even have friendly greeters with some costume touches that go with the theme… a cap, a scarf, a t-shirt, a piggy nose, a halo… anything to help folks get excited about the event.

Church folks can’t count on an apparition, some saint who might have been hanging around for a few years, to lead the hungry horde unto the temptation of emptying their kids’ college funds for a taste of the lovely church ladies’ secret, famous, mouth-watering, fresh-made, luscious family fruit pies, mile-high cakes, sinfully fudgy brownies, jumbo cookies, zippy coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni salad, bean salad, jello salads, bread and butter pickles (anything pickled!), deviled eggs (excuse me, Lord!),  baked beans, fruit breads, fried pies, buttermilk biscuits, cornbread,  spoonbread,  corn pudding, roasted corn, stewed tomatoes, fish chowder,  batter-dipped fish fry, beef stew, pulled pork, barbecue ribs, and did I mention pie?  Did I mention the sin of gluttony?

 
Lord, have mercy, but I sure miss all those sweet volunteers who knew how to raise funds and a person’s spirits with down-home cookin’.  Dishing out prepared food picked up at one of the local food warehouses just doesn’t do it for me. Going to a barbecue and not seeing or smelling the porker, makes me a bit suspicious.  Seeing the same boring pies with the tasteless cardboard crusts and plain sugary-frosted cakes that are sold at local supermarkets sends me to food purgatory.
 And while I’m confessing my desires, let’s talk white and church halls.  A blast of whiteness may be in order when I, hopefully, reach the Pearly Gates, but I need some visual stimulation (Lord, help me!), as I enter the dining hall.  Color accents around the room and on the tables and the servers help make folks happy and the event memorable.  Also, the Lord gave us music…let’s hear some.   Visual and audio starkness at a church fundraiser puts me into a Twlight Zone experience, where I feel I am in an episode involving  the departed who wish they hadn’t been so good.

 
Church fundraisers are a great idea, but they got to have some extra trimmings if they want to bring outside money to their altars.  Do it right and folks will be circling their church, dying to get in. (You know what I mean.) 

Locally, many of us live in condos without grilling facilities.  Many of us don’t cook like we once did.  We miss good homemade meals and treats. Let’s face it…many of us just want to support a worthy cause, while hangin’ with friends, pickin’ our teeth.

So by putting some hell (enthusiasm, zeal, passion, fire, and more hot sauce) into a church function,  the Lord’s chosen can raise lots of money for their worthy causes (praise, the Lord).

. 
And remember what our Lord said when leaving Big Bertha’s Barbecue Barn:

Blessed are those who make great barbecue and fixin’s,
For they arouse all our senses,
And will see the moola come unto them.
Amen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Foodie Alert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “HEAVENLY CHURCH SHINDIGS NEED A LITTLE HELL”

  1. 2iview
    July 26, 2009 at 1:26 am

    Welcome back Foodie…

    My goodness girl, you should put that to music and call it inspirational. ;-)

    Secular gathering without the collection plate and sacrament of blessing consumption seems to have a future. The resent national holiday would have attested to that point, from sea to shinning C.

    Although otherworld inspiration seems to have tradition on its side it’s hard to see Landlines or the Flying Spaghetti Monster making a comeback anytime soon…of course the Ladies will always be popular.

    Of course there’s the Surgeon General to consider, and soon if you want to love food without reading the label your insurance may want to treat your desire as a preexisting condition. Be careful what you write about food it may come back to bite you. ;-)

    Here lies

    Johnny Yeast

    Pardon me

    For not rising.

  2. 2iview
    July 26, 2009 at 8:27 am

    Hey foodie here’s a bell ringer!

    …..Cooked food, by contrast, is easier to digest, gives you more energy, and takes no time to eat. Cooking also kills bacteria and renders many natural poisons inactive. So the simple expedient of heating food gave us access to many more safe calories every day, which was a survival jackpot.

    Once we started to eat soft, cooked food, our jaws and teeth were no longer required to munch ceaselessly, and they became smaller and more delicate. That is why we don’t look like apes anymore. Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became.

    In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare. This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger scale. (Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler first discovered the relationship between gut size and brain size, dubbing it the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis.) Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains.

    As we noshed our way to modernity, Wrangham explains, our psychology changed as well. We had to develop qualities like restraint and trust. While it’s not novel to suggest that elements of human society arose around the primeval hearth, people tend to think of this in an abstract way — safe, companionable feelings developing around the campfire.

    Wrangham puts meat on these bones by comparing how other apes act around food. Chimpanzees — whom he knows intimately from decades of observation, many of those years at the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda — don’t readily share food at all. At best, they tolerate some petty theft.

    In contrast, humans of all cultures ritually share their cooked food with a network of spouses, children and more distant relatives. For cooking to get off the ground, we had to divide labor such that some individuals did the cooking and others protected the cook from less-patient individuals.

    Ideas like ownership and sharing would have become so fundamental that it’s probably more illuminating to think of these emergent beings as hunter-gatherer-cooks. Here, too, Wrangham apologetically explains, is probably where the global subjugation of women began. Women, he observes, do most of the cooking in most societies (he describes it as a historic phenomenon, not a biological necessity), and the division of labor around food could have been the beginning of the marriage contract and the prototypical human household.

    If this is the case, Wrangham argues, marriage is not a primitive contract to ensure paternity, as most anthropologists would argue, but primarily an economic contract. In a book of great ideas and otherwise wide-ranging research, this final point will be a nonrevelation to any but the above-mentioned anthropologists. Ask any single mother.

    The ambition of Wrangham’s theory gives it great appeal: Cooking is a powerful biological force and the universal activity around which the rest of human history — the households and tribes, the migrations and wars, the religion and science — arranged itself. But the added treat of the I-cook-therefore-I-am idea is the counterintuitive light it sheds on one of our most intense cultural preoccupations — living the right life by eating naturally……

    http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/article1021232.ece

  3. Dogfish
    July 27, 2009 at 10:40 am

    I am sure glad you didn’t mention which church this was.

    I might have been tempted to change my religion.

  4. Rainbow Energy
    March 13, 2010 at 4:55 pm

    And I thought it had to do with breasts…who knew!

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