Taco Tuesday

Taco Tuesdays

          Through my calling as the Relief Society President in our ward, I had heard several times about the Pathway Program – an online education program offered through BYU-I that was affordable and flexible.  Even though I originally thought it might work for me sometime down the road, I knew of several women in our Relief Society that I thought might benefit from a program like that, so I checked into the details of the program and shared with them what I learned.  Several women were very interested, but even though the tuition cost was reasonable, three of them had extremely tight budgets and felt that it would be impossible for them to come up with the money.  I knew that there must be some way to earn that money.  That was when the work began.

          There were four of us who decided to work together to earn enough money for our Pathway tuition.  We threw out all kinds of fundraising ideas, such as house- cleaning,  selling homemade crafts or having a garage sale.  We finally decided on two projects.  One was to provide drop-in babysitting one morning a week.  The other was “Taco Tuesdays”.  I tried out some different recipes and came up with our Taco Tuesday menu – warmed, big, flour tortillas with a choice of pulled pork or a ground beef mix,  a choice of  baja sauce or honey chipotle sauce, a choice of toppings  (lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cheese, red salsa and green salsa), rice and beans.   The four of us decided together that we would each work as hard as our individual schedules allowed us to, and then we would split the money equally four ways, and believe me, we each worked hard!! 

The first couple of weeks it was more difficult to get orders, but once people were in the rhythm of “Taco Tuesday”, we had people calling us to place their orders.  I was the designated shopper.  I searched for good deals and shopped the sales for the ingredients we needed.  One week I bought 75 lbs. of ground beef because it was on sale.  It went into the freezer to use on future Tuesdays.   Our goal was to sell 50 taco plates each week – some with one taco and some with two, so the shopping was no easy task.  Once the food had been bought, I would deliver ingredients to the four different women so they could prepare their assigned part;  I always prepared the meats, Priscilla made the sauces, Stephanie chopped the toppings,   and of course, Josefa always made the rice and beans because she knew just how to make them taste deee-licious.  When it was time to actually make the plates, we set up a food line on my long kitchen table.  The mood was always cheerful and enthusiastic as we worked together to special order each take-out box to be just how our customer likes it.   By the time clean-up time rolled around, we were beat.  We would make up a taco or two for each of us and eat together for a few minutes before clean up and good-byes.

          Our goal was to earn $1500 before the date that tuition was due   That included $325 tuition for the four of us, and enough to cover paying tithing as well.  Between the money we earned doing drop-in babysitting, and the majority that we earned doing Taco Tuesdays, we reached our goal.  This project was a lot of hard work, but the blessings that have come because of it have made every effort worth it.  I am so grateful for the wonderful relationships that I’ve developed with the women I worked with.  I now consider them to be among my dearest friends.  And the blessings from our work continue each day now, as I have the opportunity to strengthen my testimony and learn life changing lessons as part of the Pathway Program.