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Together, they make a meal fit for a kingdom

A crew of 300 prepares a holiday feast for shelters, shut-ins and "orphans."

By ASJYLYN LODER
Published November 24, 2006

SPRING HILL - Thanksgiving Day at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church sounded like an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn and smelled like onions, corn and turkey.

A kitchen crew of exiled New Yorkers and ex-New Englanders shouted, laughed, sliced and mashed their way through their eighth Thanksgiving together. The tradition started with a mere 250 dinners and expanded to the nearly 1,000 meals that hundreds of volunteers served Thursday to shelters, shut-ins and "orphans" - in short, anyone who doesn't have family handy to spend the holiday with, or anyone else to make them a meal.

While preparing the turkey and trimmings, the cooks shared tips for touring Italy, the best eats on Boston's Hanover Street, the comparative pronunciations of Sicilian dialects, a hearty debate on the best way to make demitasse coffee, and a just-as-hearty debate on who polished off the most Sambuca the night before.

Fred Glass, who helped start the church's Thanksgiving tradition, grabbed the expressive hands of Frank LaGala, who was part-way through a reprisal of a disastrous Milan-to-New York flight. "If I hold his hands down, he can't talk," Glass joked.

In the midst of the joking, haranguing and voluble speculation on the whereabouts of a persistently missing whisk, Glass marshalled his troop of volunteers with admirable results.

The core crew of kitchen helpers arrived at the Mariner Boulevard church at dawn Thursday. By 8 a.m., they'd filled pans with mashed potatoes, cinnamon-dusted yams and aromatic stuffing. They were already punchy from staying late Thursday night, baking, smoking, deep-frying and carving 90 turkeys.

Sheila Colletti, lightly pink-eyed after a late night slicing 20 pounds of onions for stuffing, said gamely, "It's only the first couple of onions that get to you."

"We cried together," another volunteer chimed in.

"You'd cry too if you were married to this guy," said Mike Famiglietti, pointing to Frank Colletti, a tall, spatula-wielding cook sporting a handlebar mustache.

Stephen Augello and Gene Wright handled the mashed potatoes. They had a pat system, delayed only by the occasional mislaying of whisks and spatulas.

"We can make enough mashed potatoes for 1,200 people in three hours," Augello bragged.

Outside the kitchen, a group of teens shared 11 hand-held can openers, cranking open dozens of cans of corn, peas and gravy. Others managed the tables of bread and sweets.

Folding tables stretched in rows. Pies towered in stacks of six or seven: yellow buttery crusts riven with crevasses of gooey red cherries or dark syrupy blueberries, burnished sienna disks of pumpkin and the gold-flecked crumble top of Dutch apple.

Bags of rolls, baguettes and sliced loaves of bread piled to eye-level. Sweets, donated by local Publix supermarkets, included mini danishes, rugelach, cherry turnovers, cinnamon biscuits, french twirls, black forest cake, mince pie, egg custard pie, cinnamon nut coffee cakes, croissants and more.

The big orders were laid out under handwritten sheets of paper noting the number of dinners going to local shelters: "Harbor 20," "Maryland House 25," "Teen Center 25," "Dawn Center 40."

Holy Ground, a shelter for homeless men, had enough meals coming for 70 people. That's 30 pounds of turkey, two gallons of gravy, three short sheet pans of mashed potatoes, three of sweet potatoes and three more of stuffing, plus a gallon of corn, a gallon of peas, plastic single-servings of cranberry sauce, two garbage bags stuffed with rolls, seven small bags of bread, two carrot cakes, a German chocolate cake, two cinnamon coffee cakes, a chocolate glazed cake and three pies.

By 11 a.m., volunteer drivers began lining up. They started with Glass. From typewritten sheets to handwritten scraps of paper, he handed out addresses and directions. "This is two meals," he said handing a slip to a volunteer driver. "This one is six."

At the bread and sweets table, teens loaded plastic bags and hoisted them out to the waiting cars.

That was followed by the turkey line. LaGala expedited while a line of volunteers spooned gravy over containers of turkey, added a generous plop of mashed potatoes, a handful of peas and corn and some yams.

Some drivers come back year after year.

Karen Lunde and her 9-year-old son, Alec Lunde, volunteered for their third year in a row.

Lunde took a delivery slip from Glass, making him promise that he'd given her a real address this time. "He sends me on a wild goose chase, but I find it," she said.

"Last year, I sent her four blocks and she ended up in Pasco County," Glass said.

Mary Joan Wright moved to Spring Hill four years ago from New York. She met and teamed up with another exiled New Yorker, Phil Lanieri. The pair made two runs, delivering 20 meals altogether.

Local fire houses and police stations received deliveries for the unlucky officers working the holiday.

The volunteers accepted three deliveries at most, so the food would arrive hot. Some ran just one delivery. Others kept coming back until all the meals had gone out. Some deliveries included one or two meals. Others included 16.

It didn't matter, as long as folks called ahead. They had plenty. A few last-minute phone calls got Glass's cheerful greeting, and an "Of course," when asked if they could still get dinners delivered. No one was turned away.

By 1 p.m., most of the deliveries had gone out the door, more than 600 meals. The kitchen crew took a brief break, cleaning dishes and counters while teens started setting the tables for the next round. At 2 p.m., they expected more than 250 people for dinner.

Asjylyn Loder can be reached at aloder@sptimes.com or 352754-6127

[Last modified November 23, 2006, 22:38:01]