- 8/25/2007 10:54:30 PMBooyah Fundraiser WrapupWhat is booyah? Some call it liquid gold, while others say it is nothing more than glorified chicken soup. I think it is somewhere in between. Our preparation journey had started earlier in the week with Peggy and Mary shopping for supplies. They purchased precut canned vegetables from one of the restaruant supply stores. Jon and Mary supplied the beef and we supplied the chicken (which we butchered last fall). On Friday during the rummage sale, we began to cook down the meat.
When I got home from work, Peggy asked me to go right over to Grandma's house and help debone the chicken - all 30 pounds of it. Me, Grandma, Megan and James all pulling bones and separating out undesireable pieces from the meat. When we were done, we had a very large bowl of meat and 20 quarts of "liquid gold" - the greasy chicken broth that would act as the base for the booyah.
We got home late and wanted to go to bed when we saw the 2 bags of onions on the counter. "Those need to be cut up", Peggy said. "Would you do it?" she asked. I said "sure... all of them?" "Yes", she replied. "All 20 pounds of them".
I'll tell you what, cutting up 20 pounds of onions does something to a man... Even with a food processor, it was unbearable. I knew better than to touch my face or rub my eyes, but that didn't help any. There was so much onion vapor in the kitchen, no one else could even stand to be in the room. Have you ever been around a bond fire and when you got home you realized you smelled like smoke? My cloths, my hair, my skin. Everything! I reeked of onion.
The next day, we got up early and headed right for Grandma's to get the rummage sale going. Then we went directly to Memorial field to setup under the pavillion. We were told that we may be getting a 50 gallon booyah kettle so we did a little rough calculating on our potential earnings:
50 gallons x 4 quarts per gallon = 200 quarts
200 quarts at $4.00 = $800
subtract $62 in supplies
Maximum profit (if we sold out) = $738
I felt pretty good about the numbers and so I began to hope for good soup eating weather. Not too hot of a day, but perhaps a little cool with a nice breeze to carry the smell of the soup.
When Jon arrived at Grandma's, I learned that we could only get a 20 gallon kettle and that we would have to use Nesco roasters for the other 30 gallons. This was not really a setback, but it did complicate things a little. There was nothing we could do about it now, we had to keep moving forward.
We arrived at the park at 9:00 and by 10:00 we had the fire going and water heating up in the cast iron caldron. I had never seen a wood fired booyah kettle before. It is an aparatus that looks like it came right out of the dark ages. This one had a stainless steel barrel that supported the iron bowl. Both of them take 2 strong men to move around.
By 11:00, the soup was boiling and ready to go. I honestly could not smell anything. Between the heat coming off of the caldron and the smoke, I could not smell the booyah. The parade from the Fun Fest starts over by Grandma's house and ends at the park. As visitors come into the park, the pavillion where we were located is one of the first things they see. Apparently our booyah was the first thing they smelled too. One customer commented to me, "I didn't know I wanted booyah until I smelled it".
We flew through the booyah. Jon kept filling bowls and quarts and the customers came at a steady pace. Jon said, "I don't know where all this soup is going! I keep filling the containers but where are they?" Jon filled and filled and filled. By 2:30, we had run out of solid pieces in the caldron and only broth remained. Our goal was to sell until 3:00 or until we sold out. We didn't sell out but there was nothing more we could do. Final total: $538. Wow!
I had a bowl of it and I can definately say, it was very good. We even had some visitors from the Lions club come and get some. They said it was good too. I found out later that we had beaten them in sales for the day. That is kind of surprising since I could definately smell the burgers and brats they were cooking.
When we got home, we picked up the mail and discovered an envelope that contained a check from TNT Fireworks to help with our adoption. It was $200 which - when added to our booyah sales brought our income to $738. This as you will recall, was our estimated maximum income.
Thank you Roger - May God bless you and your family!
