A very long day

Yesterday I found out that somehow our catering service was triple booked for today. We had to deliver lunch to Rolling Fork (40 miles west), Lexington (40 miles north east) and to the Parker Roark House (also known as 'home' to my mom and dad). Finding this out on a Monday after being gone all weekend is pretty bad in the restaurant world. Monday is our order day. We get a grocery truck on Tuesday. Most Mondays find us out of almost everything. Yesterday was no exception. We were out of beans, potato salad, slaw, dessert, rolls, everything necessary to feed our crowds on Tuesday. We scrambled yesterday and luckily our friends working for us helped us plan for today. We started early this morning furiously restocking our standard sides for both the restaurant and for our catering trips. In the midst of all this we fried our awesome chicken and got everything else ready.
I will admit I was pretty freaked out yesterday. I told my husband last night that for a few minutes it could have gone either way...it was either off to Whitfield State Hospital or going to be ok. Luckily I didn't find Chuck E. Cheese standing at my oven baking pizza and struedel. (OK, that's the best picture I can come up with to indicate insanity.)
This morning we had a kitchen full of folks, each handling something that had to be done to get us open for lunch. When I'm in full blown freak out mode, I always forget that Ubon's Slaw is the easiest thing I've got to do. Try it:

Empty 2 bags of CABBAGE SLAW MIX into a bowl. Add 2 tsp BLACK PEPPER, 1 tsp KOSHER SALT, 1.5 tsp UBON'S SEAZN'T UP (if you don't have it use one of your lesser awesome cajun seasoning mixes) and 1/4 cup SWEET PICKLE RELISH. Mix thoroughly. Add about 1 cup of COLE SLAW DRESSING. Mix again.

This is our official side order for the Big Apple Barbeque Block Party. After making thousands of pounds of this stuff you reach a point where you can make it by feel. By the Way....I hate to measure anything. It's great to experiment and learn to trust your judgement. It's cooking! You can treat it like science but why? We have a rule that if it's gross, we'll throw it out and go to MacWhatever.

When Daddy started learning how to cook Boston butts, we had some awful stuff. Every now and then he'd get it right, and I think those times were an accident. Daddy has never been one to sorta do something. We had so much sourdough bread one winter that I still can't handle the smell. I digress. We had so much pork that Daddy decided to experiment to get rid of it. We've used it in jambalaya...that works. We've used it on salads...that works. But Smoked Meat Soup is a disaster. It was a MacWhatever night. Daddy, never one to throw anything away unless necessary, put the soup in the cat's bowl. The cat sniffed, gagged and ran away. It never hurts to try though.