Area residents help friend fight cancer with food sale
With an adroit flick of her wrist Elisa Narvaez turned out one enchilada after another Saturday at Iola’s First Christian Church.
By nightfall, 25 volunteers had made 536 dozen enchiladas, all but a handful pre-sold to benefit Patty Patterson, Gas, who is being treated for cancer.
It was the epitome of small-town life, people coming together to help a friend.
Kristina DeLaTorre got the ball rolling.
“She’s my very best friend,” said DeLaTorre.
“And she’s mine,” replied Patterson as they exchanged a hug and wiped away quick-forming tears.
The two met through DeLaTorre’s children who attended a preschool at which Patterson taught.
CANCER TREATMENT, including peripheral costs for such things as travel, is costly no matter the insurance. Knowing that, DeLaTorre thought about what she could do to help out.
“Robert (her husband) suggested we put on a softball tournament,” DeLaTorre said. “That would have been OK, but you really don’t make much after all the expenses.”
Then came the idea of selling enchiladas.
The DeLaTorre and Patterson families and their friends jumped aboard. Such projects know no bounds.
NOT LONG after the rooster crowed Friday morning, Kristina and Robert DeLaTorre carried 713 pounds of ground beef into the First Christian Church’s spacious kitchen, filled 12 roasters and started boiling the meat.
“We cooked all day,” she said, and well into the night. “We had some others come to help in the evening, but it was midnight before we had the hamburger all cooked.”
Saturday, with 250 pounds of grated cheese and stack after stack of tortillas also on hand, Narvaez and others with nimble hands gathered four to a table and began assembling enchiladas.
Roasters were filled with sizzling grease prepped the tortillas that were filled with meat and cheese and rolled to produce the enchiladas.
“You have to do it just right,” observed Robert DeLaTorre Sr., Kristina’s father-in-law, as he dipped tortillas into a special sauce and then dropped them one at a time into the grease, careful to turn and extract each before over-cooking occurred. Tortillas have to be supple — and hot — to make good enchiladas.
“It feels good to put your hands into the hamburger” — refrigerated overnight — “after you’ve handled the tortillas for a while,” Narvaez said.
The enchiladas sold for $15 a dozen, which equates to just over $8,000 gross. DeLaTorre said expenses were about $2,500, leaving $5,500 to help Patterson.
“It was a lot of work, but none of us thought anything about it,” she said, allowing it was labor of love.
