A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were part of a team that prepared and served a corned beef dinner at our church. We call the four-time-a-year dinners “the 4F dinners” — which stands for “food, fun, fundraising and fellowship.” I can’t remember how long we’ve been doing these meals but I’m guessing it’s over 12 years.

The menu has been pretty much the same over the years — salad, corned beef, taters, carrots, onions, cabbage, soda bread, and bread pudding with Amaretto sauce for dessert in honor of St. Patrick’s Day; salad, porkloin roast on the grill, funeral potatoes, green beans with bacon and onion, fresh rolls, and brownies for dessert early in the summer; salad, old-fashioned pot roast with all the trimmings later in the summer; and in the fall we do salad, yummy chicken breasts, twice-baked potatoes, green beans with bacon and onion, home-made bread and oatmeal cake.

There’s a core group of about 10 of us who go home exhausted after each meal but also who can’t wait for the next one ‘cause we have such a good time planning, cooking, serving and cleaning up as well as adding some dollars to the maintenance fund to take care of our 100-year-old church building.

After our last dinner I got to thinking about some of my favorite meals as a kid. Maybe it was time to shake up the 4F menus a little bit and there was something from my childhood that we could switch to.

My mom was a great cook. I’m not sure how she was able to prepare a complete dinner every night of the week. She and dad both worked full time and since we lived in a suburb of Chicago neither of them had a short commute to and from work. Yet every day she prepared a full meal — meat, either taters or pasta, a canned vegetable and always a salad — not necessarily a typical lettuce salad — but things like a pineapple ring with a chunk of cream cheese in the middle, some peach slices with cottage cheese, sometimes half a canned pear with shredded cheddar on top or the occasional lettuce wedge with French dressing.

I still make some of her specialty dishes: chili; spaghetti sauce; pork chops, rice and gravy; and fresh green beans with bacon, onion and taters, and if I do say so myself all of those meals are very tasty. But after several attempts I’ve given up trying to make her recipes for Spanish rice, Sloppy Joes, stuffed pork chops or Hungarian goulash. They just never come out as yummy as when she made them.

My husband makes mom’s version of pot roast (with taters, carrots and onions) as well as her recipe for scalloped potatoes with ham. He swears his dishes don’t turn out as well as hers, but I totally disagree. In fact whenever he asks for suggestions for dinner, I choose one of those two meals he has mastered.

But I digress. Back to the church dinners. I asked Mike if we should check with the rest of the 4F team about maybe switching up the menu. We talked about other dinners we had tried in the past — beef stroganoff, shish-k-bob, meatloaf.

I think we’ll probably stick with the tired and true four dinners. They seem to be the most popular. We basically have the shopping lists down to a science so we can adjust how much to buy depending on the number of reservations (we’ve served anywhere from 40-80 people), we’ve determine how early we need to be at church to prepare each meal and like they say, “Don’t mess with success.”