Noah's Ark

Last night our Relief Society held their second Enrichment meeting for the year. Kit, our Enrichment counsellor and Phyllis, our Enrichment leader decided to focus on welfare. Now before you all groan and say, 'not welfare again', read on - it was a brilliant evening.

As a Presidency, Deeanne, myself and Kit have really felt strongly about pushing this area all year and we really hope that the sisters who attended last night (and those who are reading the blog because you could not make it) have felt inspired and motivated to work on their food storage and being prepared for times of natural and personal crisis in their lives.

Here is how the night unfolded.

The Primary room was set up with a number of displays.

Dehydrating - Kit and Simone
Sprouting - Deidre
72hr pack - Simone
Mike Moores Survival Kit - Mike

A number of work stations were set up around the front of the room and the sisters' in charge of those spent a little bit of time talking about their product, demonstrating how the product can be used, how to store it, the best place to purchase it, approximate pricing and recipes.

Grains (wheat, rice pasta) - Alison
Honey/sugar - Jackie
Milk - Melanie
Oil - Liz
Water - Rachel
Beans - Barbara

After our presentation of the workstations which included little tidbits to try - yumo!!, we moved onto our next segment. Kit had asked everyone to bring a tin from their food storage cupboard. Now it could be anything except, beetroot, fish or fruit. From this we were going to be privileged to try Pam's Hobo stew. What is that you ask?

Pam's family love to go camping and by the end of their holiday they are down to a mismatch of things left to eat so Pam throws everything into a pot and they have a hobo stew. Now it is famous and every year they end their camp on a hobo stew.

We were all a bit dubious that our plethora of cans mixed altogether in a pot would produce something palatable but later in the night we were pleasantly surprised to find that it actually tasted quite good. Amazing! We got quite a few comments like, 'why do we even bother to cook at all'. Let's just throw everything in a pot every night.

Our final segment of the night was our Iron Chef Cook Off. If any of you have watched Iron Chef on SBS, you'll know what a laugh this would be. The TV show has this supposedly famous chef usually from Japan who has a cook off against another chef. The catch is to cook a three course meal using one main ingredient as their base. They have a time limit of 1hr and only find out what their ingredient is, just prior to starting. Can you imagine trying to make a dessert out of cabbage?

Toni, Liz and Miranda

Sister Jorgensen and Mel

Jackie, Emma, Bev and Pam (trying to escape the photo)

Miranda and Liz

Phyllis, Sister Doig, Barbara and Simone

Anyway Kit had compiled 5 boxes with different ingredients and we had to make something out of what we had. She had pre-cooked the noodles and rice so we could use those as our base. We had 20 minutes within which to complete our task and Bishop was the judge.

Louise, Rikki, Maureen (hiding) and Luz

Miranda and Liz... again!!

Our brave judge.... Bishop Porter

And do you know what, they all tasted really good. We had risotto, bolognaise, a curry dish just to mention a few and so by the end of the night we had lots of healthy yummy food to share for supper.

It was a wonderfully successful evening and we cannot thank enough those who gave of their time and talents to ensure the night was a learning and fun experience.

We also cannot forget to thank Jackie Walker and Leah Bradbury for looking after the kids in the nursery.


If anyone missed out on a handout, they will be in the RS room on Sunday or please contact Kit as we had quite a few spares left over.