Tuesday was National Night out. It is a night where our community gets to meet each other and our local police. National Night out is probably our neighborhoods largest social event.

We take over a local park, setup many inflatable kids activities, have face painting, clowns, balloon art, side walk chalk drawings and free hotdogs, ice cream and samosas. The husband and I have volunteered for this for a few years. The husband cooks and serves hotdogs and samosas. I am the gopher. I empty the garbage, hand out water bottles, substitute for volunteers when they need it (I made and served popcorn for about an hour only burning two batches) and help on whatever crises crop op.

There were two crises this year.

The relish... Usually the someone from the committee buys a dozen bottles of squeezable relish for the event. This year he couldn't find squeezable relish in the store. He bought squeeze bottles and big bottles of relish at Costco. That relish was too chunky to squirt out of the squeeze bottles. So we cut the squeeze bottles to open up the hole. No luck. The relish was still to chunky. So we blended the relish and then put it in the squeeze bottles. Success.

Second crises... the samosas. Last year we served up about two hundred samosas. There are plenty of vegetarians in the neighborhood and the samosas offer them something instead of hot dogs. 

Thirty minutes before the event started, I drove over to another volunteers house to pick up the samosas. They were still frozen. Last year we bought pre-cooked samosas from a local restaurant. This year the guy in charge of buying the food tried to save money by buying two hundred raw frozen samosas. We didn't know about this until the last minute.

"But the instructions say just put them in the oven at 350F for 15 minutes!"

Two hundreds raw frozen samosas don't fit into one or two ovens. We split them into ten trays. The volunteer baked six of the trays in her two ovens and on her BBQ. I baked the remaining in my oven and on my BBQ. I think about half of the samosas baked properly. The other half welded themselves to the tray, or baked into a large mass.

We showed up to the party thirty minutes late, but with enough samosas to satisfy a few families.

When we ran out we just said "The samosas were very popular. We'll get more this year."

The guy who bought the frozen samosas apologized. Next year we'll use the restaurant again.