food

i swear there was this food not bombs recipe book i saw someone post forever ago on the site that might be useful cause they feed lots of people all the time. if i end up finding it i'll share unless someone else has it on hand.

5 loaves of fish and 2 bread

Stew my beloved....

A bean chilli is a great option imo and is great served over rice (run from it, hide from it, beans and rice will always appear when good inexpensive nutrition is required). Potatoes are also a great stew base.

Beans and rice! Cheap, filling, nutritious, and vegan. You can make a huge pot of beans by soaking them overnight, then cooking them with a half an onion (or 2), garlic, and salt them mid-way through. Should take about an hour to cook, add water as necessary.

Casseroles have kinda a bad reputation, but genuinely, big trays of baked stuff is a great way to feed a lot of people, and they don't have to suck.

Mac and Cheese is kinda a classic crowd pleaser. Tater tot, other pasta bakes, french toast or bread pudding great for something sweeter. You can make mexican food this way too, basically same ingredients as a soft taco layered up, easier to cook and serve.

I'd look into плов and the general pattern of adding rice with ingredients to a rice cooker with some sauce and then mixing it all together when its done cooking.

I've been to sikh and hare Krishna temples where they give free food to all kinds of people, way more than 50. So curries, stews, all kinds of wet food you can mop up with some rice or bread are always the best bet for these places. Many Indian or south Asian dishes are very easily scalable once you know how to make them.

When I did food not bombs we would also make big batches of pasta and minestrone soup, but soup is trickier because you need a deep plate to serve it on and spoons to eat it. Pasta on the other hand, you just need to decide on a sauce and make a huge batch of it.

If you can get your hands on big pots and can bake, a soup with bread might work too.

Lentil & vegetable soup is delicious, filling and can be made to any flavour profile. Root vegetables and tinned tomatoes work great in it and are cheap. I tend to blend it with a stick blender and it's very nice. And if you can bake bread loaves, you don't need that many for 50 people as a side.

A lentil or a chickpea curry could also work with the rice, if you make a huge pot, it would be a filling meal for lots of people. The sides like raita is also something that is easy to make in bulk.

I have also made vegetarian lasagna and other casseroles like that for pretty big groups and it works great. So do salads. I have a go-to "chicken" & macaroni salad that I make pretty often. The chicken is soy strips, the cheap dry kind.

A lot of Chinese recipes are literally to toss some vegetables in a hot pan with some oil, garlic, ginger, and green onions then splash a sauce on it and sprinkle in some salt or sugar and serve next to rice. Change what vegetables and what sauce you use and bam, it's a different dish.

Curry Rice isn't the easiest thing listed here but I'd suggest it anyway because it's delicious. It's basically a stew which means you can put in whatever you want to adjust to your dietary needs and combined with being served on rice you don't need to make a ton per person (though a ton of rice per person, yeah, but with a rice cooker that's very very easy)

50 big macs

bumping so you get answers

Burritos. They have the added benefit of being easy to distribute and require no additional utensils. It’s a bit more labor intensive than the other suggestions but still a cost effective option.

Spaghetti. Noodles are cheap, canned tomato sauce is cheap, but then season up your sauce to actually have flavor.

Alternately, Here's my ratio for perfect Mexican style refried beans:

1 lb pinto beans (2 cups), well rinsed

1 tbs salt

1 serrano or jalapeno pepper, seeds removed

1 half white onion

2 smashed garlic cloves

2 pinches (1 tsp?) oregano or one-each oregano and epazote

2 tbs oil (I just gloop it in unmeasured)

After your beans are well rinsed, bring just plain beans to a boil for 5 mins, remove from heat, and let sit for 30 mins. Then dump the water, add fresh cold water to 1-2" above the beans, add all the other ingredients, bring to boil, simmer for at least 1 hour but closer to 2 is better. Once beans have the right texture, blend them into a puree. You now have perfect beans for any Mexican recipe. Can be scaled up, just use the proportions listed above

That hawaiian macaroni pasta salad i posted and was attacked over it being "midwestern" is great for this. Lots of macaroni, lots of vegetables, lots of mayonnaise, seasoning. You eat it cold so you don't have to worry about re heating

You can make a lot of rice paper rolls before hand, but I feel like that volume of people will be a struggle.

For example, if each guest has a cup of plain rice to eat and it takes 15 minutes to cook, the last ten guests will be eating an hour and 15 minutes after the first ten guests started.

Sutlac for dessert

If you have a Costco membership I think they have a bunch of platters that you could get

I'd say bigos. It's

• Cabbage
• Onions
• whatever meat or meatlike thing you have or can acquire
• sauerkraut
• tomato paste
• broth
• bay leaf, pepper, salt, maybe some paprika

pan fry onions, brown meat, fry tomato paste on the whole ordeal, add all the rest and let simmer until it's all soft and the tastes have melted together. Gets better over the days (until it goes bad).

I know it might sound like a joke food from the USSR but everyone I've ever made it for really liked it

if you have a slowcooker or just a big pot it would be easy to make a good vegetable soup or vegan chilli (that way anyone can eat from the large pot) and pair that with smaller dishes

Oh I forgot to add! If you're prepping large amounts of veggies try to get a professional-grade mandolin (and cut-safe gloves), of even better, a used robocoupe. Most of the fatigue from cooking is prepping the veggies, so this helps immensely.

Pancit bihon!

Chili, curry, large bowls of leafy stuff (salads and slaws). Pasta dishes can be ramped up easily too if you have the large pots to cook a ton at a time. Seasoned rices good for large amounts of starches. Stews/heavy soups can be perfect as you can often make them cover a lot of foodgroups and thus they can be the singular thing you make if people don't mind. A 10-cup rice cooker might not be enough to make a large curry/stew/etc for 50 people though, that might be enough for 10-20 I'd think, you'd need to get a really large pot (restaurant supply will likely have? But it may not be super cheap). Its hard for me to say personally because I don't think I've ever tried to feed more than 10-15 people at a time. A bowl of stew is probably a bit more than a cup though, try pouring cups out into whatever bowl you would want to serve with to see how much it takes!

Recipe I would suggest soup/stew wise: https://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/italian-sausage-tortellini-soup/

To make it vegan/vegetarian you can replace the sausage with soyrizo, which changes the base flavor quite a bit but not at all in a bad way. The cheese tortellini can be replaced with any number of other pastas, especially as tortellini tends to be expensive. The soup base can be veggie stock. I've made this on a number of camping trips and it can be quite filling. I would also add white beans and/or chickpeas to add more nutrition/filling. Can also add spinach in addition to the kale, or substitute spinach and remove the kale altogether. This recipe can be very cheap depending on how you're sourcing your ingredients, especially since soyrizo can be found for much cheaper than actual sausage.

You can make a huge pot of tomato sauce and add your protein of choice. This is a pretty standard red sauce recipe, but you can adjust it for convenience, like if using crushed tomatoes is easier than having to blend the whole ones. https://www.seriouseats.com/easy-italian-amercian-red-sauce-recipe

As for protein, I usually go with a mix of ground beef and ground pork, either as meatballs or just browned and broken up in the pan before starting the sauce. For a vegetarian option though, you can't go wrong with cannellini beans tossed in for the last 20-30 mins of cooking just so they soften a bit and take on some flavor.

I usually serve it over pasta or with some hearty bread.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-teapot-mobile-kitchen-the-anarchist-teapot-mobile-kitchen-s-guide-to-feeding-the-mass