"Taste of Sam's"

"Taste of Sam's" is over for another year. It's always nice to have it over, especially if it was busy. It was definitely busy!

Every year, usually the weekend before Thanksgiving, Sam's Club has an event called, A Taste of Sam's " where we go all out to demo the new holiday products, as well as the tried and true products. Of course, I'm speaking of food products. We have the whole demo staff involved, some cooking in the kitchen and trying to keep up with demand. The rest of us are on the sales floor, serving the members and their guests. We are generous with the products and keep serving from 10:30 AM until 6:00 PM, then we have to clean up. We do this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I was on the dessert table all 3 days, changing partners each day. We gave out samples of cheesecake every day, always one flavor from The Cheesecake Factory, plus a couple of other brands we carry. We offered apple crisp, nice and warm, with vanilla bean ice cream. We had mini eclairs and cream puffs, sugar cookies and something called profiteroles, which are like puffed pastry dipped in chocolate with flavored cream fillings. Two days we offered fair trade coffee, and one day eggnog.

You have to pretty much get an assembly line going, putting all the samples on a plate and getting them out to people. Bear in mind that you're serving from frozen cheesecake that needs to be cut all day. When we were serving ice cream, we had to keep it from melting as much as possible. We'd just get going good, when someone would want coffee or eggnog and one of us would have to stop to pour. Because of temperature concerns, the drinks couldn't be put out early.

We were busy all three days, but Saturday was unrelenting. Of course, each of us had to take breaks and lunch, leaving the other to slog on by themselves.

The first two days, we were taking cheesecakes out of the freezer maybe 2 at a time, so they were pretty frozen. It really became difficult to cut them. On Sunday, I took 4 each of the 2 cakes we were doing and let them soften up while we were getting set up for the day. That worked a little better, but by the 4th cake, it was soft enough to be sticking to the knife. We figure we served 2000 people.

I went home each night and had to put heat packs on my right hand.With carpel tunnel and arthritis, I was pretty uncomfortable. In fact, all day on Monday, I wore my brace, which I usually only wear at night.

By Sunday night, we were all pretty tired. At least I've got 4 days off now. I did the washing yesterday, going up and down the basement stairs and packing up the clean clothes while MaryLou worked on the tile for the shower. She got the area around the tub faucet re tiled while worked. Today, we went down to Home Depot to get a few more tiles and realised that we were both really tired and needed a day off, so we are relaxing for the rest of the day.