A thousand grilled steaks and enough chowder to fill a small swimming pool.

How do you cook 1,000 steaks simultaneously? Easy.

How do you make chowder for 1,000? Not so easy!

Every summer, on the first Saturday of July, the field next to Souris, Prince Edward Island’s hockey rink is transformed into a magical place. A team of volunteers, a truckload of food, several portable kitchens, a rolling wood-burning oven, an army squadron, a wagonload of hay bales, several thousand colourful lupins, a hungry crowd and a few very deserving charities come together to create miracles. At the end of the day, a new cookhouse in rural Kenya stands as a tangible memory of what a community can do when people work together for a good cause.

The Village Feast is a celebration of the bounty of rural life in the Maritimes. The menu of the day features 100 per cent local ingredients. The event is a giant steak dinner for 1,000, a raucous party and a fundraiser for the PEI-based charity Farmers Helping Farmers and local food and clothing banks.

The idea is always the easiest part.

The first year’s biggest challenge was convincing a team of rookies that it’s actually possible to cook for 1,000. We created a plan, divvied up the work and put our heads down, selling out the event before I had a chance to fully design the logistics. I figured the steaks would be easy. We begged and borrowed every giant grill within 50 miles so we had the searing real estate we needed, but it wasn’t until we were setting up the field that I realized crowd control would be a major issue.

Every chef knows the most important part of the steak experience is getting the doneness right. Everyone wants their steak cooked the way they order it, so we rustled up a wagon-load of hay bales, laid out traffic flow lanes and created grill stations dedicated to each steak doneness: rare, medium-rare, medium and medium-well. I couldn’t bring myself to cook the beautiful steaks well done but the crowd had other ideas. Easily half of our guests lined up in the medium-well line looking for well. Out of 1,000, maybe 10 opted for rare. Year two’s system would clearly need to be rethought. Especially the chowder.

A thousand bowls of chowder could fill a small swimming pool. We had absolutely no way of heating such a huge volume without burning it, so I called in a favour. The morning of the event I found myself 70 km away in the banquet kitchens of the Delta Prince Edward, heating the chowder in their giant prep kettles. The hot soup was packed into holding cabinets and driven by truck to the site, arriving hot and tasty, but a bit late. Never again I vowed.

For the second year the army rescued us; a task force from CFB Gagetown rolled into town and deployed a field kitchen. The soldiers were a welcome addition to the team, serving the chowder in fine style and adding lots of spirited energy to the event. The crowd loved being able to walk onto the trailer to get their chowder and the soldiers were great ambassadors for the Canadian Forces. But how would we top ourselves in year three?

The Village Feast is a celebration of the bounty in our back yard. It’s a chance to remind ourselves that we are blessed with so much we have enough to share. The chowder, the beef, the potatoes, butter and cream all come from local farmers. The event is even timed to coincide with our local strawberry season, which arrives long before local vegetables. For the first two years we grilled skewers of bell peppers, zucchini and tomato, but were left with a pile of empty boxes from California.

For the third year we needed local salad, but not just any salad.

A local organic farmer—Becky Townshend of Fortune Organics—graciously accepted the commission to grow a custom salad for us. We eagerly anticipated the results, watching as the seeds were planted six weeks in advance, then worried incessantly as the rain didn’t co-operate. Of course Mother Nature came through, and we were rewarded with a blend of 20 different lettuces, tender greens, herbs and flowers. But we didn’t stop there.

Speerville Flour Mill is Atlantic Canada’s premier miller of organic grains and flours, many of them grown on PEI. Owners Tony and Todd Grant happily haul an amazing copper-clad wood-burning oven all over the Maritimes and enthusiastically agreed to join the Village Feast. With the help of their baker, Doug Brown, they fired the oven and baked loaf after loaf of organic Red Fife bread, slicing thick slabs onto every plate.

The organic salad topped with organic bread was a bigger hit than the steaks!

After three years the Village Feast has become an annual tradition, an unofficial start to our summer season and a giant celebration of our local food. Through our partnership with Farmers Helping Farmers, we have now built three cookhouses in rural Kenya and are helping provide a nutritious meal to more than 1,000 kids a day. We have funded our local food bank and provided several hundred winter coats for kids. Our community takes enormous pride in the event and it sells out easily. We’re proud of our village, and proud that we can help another village.

And we now have four steak lanes: medium-rare, medium, medium-well—and burnt!