Meals Amid The Mayhem When Disaster Strikes, These Cooks Help Feed The Hungry Workers

The floodwaters were rising and Liz Mill still had hundreds of mouths to feed.

In the white renovated school bus, coffee pots were percolating and women were making sandwiches as fast as sandbags were going up along the Coeur d’Alene River in Cataldo, Idaho.

It was the 1996 deluge. Mill and her crew with the Kootenai County Emergency Auxiliary were handing out doughnuts and coffee to hundreds of stranded residents. Members of the Idaho National Guard were famished and it seemed that every police officer in North Idaho had a growling stomach.

Suddenly the waters were upon them.

One person held on to the coffee pot. Another grabbed the steaming pots on the grill, and they wheeled their makeshift kitchen to higher ground.

“We were running back and forth,” recalls Mill. “By the time it was over I had only a piece of bread and gravy.”

Life is less stressful these days for Mill, who retired from the kitchen crew last month after almost 15 years of feeding hot meals to hungry firefighters, police officers, search crews and disaster victims.

The women brew gallons of hot coffee, stew and chili. The menus come from donated food along with grocery store sale items.

Comfort food always sits on the stove waiting for the tired and hungry workers to return from their efforts.

“If they were to say, `We’re not going to do it anymore,’ they’d be lynched,” says Kootenai County Sheriff’s Lt. Skip Rapp, who oversees the county’s search and rescue operations.

The auxiliary began when Mill, then married to a member of the Sheriff’s Posse, waited for her husband to return from a night of searching for a lost hunter in 1986.

“One person had taken a couple of sandwiches,” she says. “I thought, if they were out there willing to risk their lives for someone else, then there should be someone out there to give them a boost.”

So Mill and another law enforcement wife packed up a pickup truck with food and headed out. The search lasted for days. The hunter was eventually found dead of an apparent heart attack.

Since then, the dozen or so members of the auxiliary have been to shootouts, drownings, floods, train crashes, airplane crashes.

Earlier this month they were sent to a rock slide in Bayview, Idaho, where they served up meals to firefighters, highway officials and crews working on the road.

They sleep crammed into trailers or on golf courses for a few hours, rising in the morning to mix pancake batter in 5-gallon paint cans.

Many times they’re not only serving food to feed a hungry stomach, they’re lending a listening ear to a troubled soul.

“You’ll run into some cases where the fellas will want to chat a little and cut up a little. You keep it light,” Mill says. Cooking for a crowd means improvising and finding staple foods that are easy to make in tough times.

`We want to give them the best meal, the hottest meal in the winter time and the most nutritious meal you can give them,” says Faye Kaminski, Mill’s successor as auxiliary president. “You try to make it as appetizing as you can make it with what you have to work with and the conditions we have to work in.”

A continuous supply of water and sports drinks are always on hand for workers who need quick hydration. Doughnuts continually grace the counters for deputies who need to grab a quick breakfast before heading out to chase down a criminal.

“You want something they can grab and run,” Mill said.

But by the end of the day there’s nothing like sitting down to a steaming bowl of chili or stew to warm a cold body, even if no one asks for it.

“Those guys would eat just about anything,” Kaminski says.

If you’ve got a crowd to feed, you don’t have to wait for disaster to strike to prepare these recipes from Liz Mill.

Beer Pancakes

5 pounds pancake mix (preferably Krusteaz)

8 eggs

A handful of sugar (about 1/2 cup)

1 cup vegetable oil

1 (12-ounce) can beer

Vegetable oil for the griddle

Combine pancake mix, eggs, sugar and oil in a 5-gallon container with a lid. Mix well, adding beer until the mixture reaches a batter consistency.

Cover with a loose-fitting lid or a cloth and let stand in a warm place at least 8 hours. If the batter is too thick, add water.

Pour batter onto the griddle in 1/3 cupfuls. Cook until bottoms are golden and bubbles begin to break on the surface. Flip and cook another 2 to 3 minutes.

Yield: 30 to 40 servings.

Nutrition information per each of 40 servings: 282 calories, 10 grams fat (32 percent fat calories), 8 grams protein, 40 grams carbohydrate, 52 milligrams cholesterol, 2 grams dietary fiber, 801 milligrams sodium.

Mulligan Stew

5 pounds chopped stew meat

5 pounds carrots, chopped

5 pounds potatoes, diced

2 large onions, diced

1 bunch celery stalks, diced

2 (15-ounce) cans green peas, or 1 (32-ounce) package frozen peas

2 (28-ounce) cans tomatoes

2 (1.5-ounce) packages stew seasoning mix

2 (.75-ounce) packages beef gravy mix

1 gallon water

Brown meat in a large pot. Add remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for about 1-1/2 hours.

Yield: 15 to 20 servings.

Nutrition information per each of 20 servings: 559 calories, 24 grams fat (39 percent fat calories), 39 grams protein, 47 grams carbohydrate, 113 milligrams cholesterol, 9 grams dietary fiber, 1,549 milligrams sodium.