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A RFTA Thanksgiving

Delish.com

Cooking a Thanksgiving meal is a big job under normal family circumstances… imagine cooking up the big meal for a crowd.  One local woman is whipping up a spread for  the many bus drivers and other employees of the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority who are on the clock today. APR’s Elise Thatcher has the details.

Reporter: As of this Thanksgiving morning, Susan DeCillis has been up all night. She’s had a lot to prepare… because she’s putting on supper for a hundred and fifty.

Susan DeCillis: “This year I’m doing nine turkeys, and potatoes, and stuffing, gravy, and homemade cranberry sauce. And our fresh bread I bring bagels and butter and all our bread. Some vegetable salad, and then some pumpkin pie and some brownies.”

Reporter: When I spoke with DeCillis earlier this week, she was essentially planning on cooking and baking nonstop until today.

DeCillis: “I’ll put the turkeys in the oven around one o’clock in the morning, and they’ll come out at five or six. Then I put everything else in the oven to get it hot. Usually all the other vegetables are ready to go they just have to be heated up. Then I carve all the  turkeys, put them in the trays.”

Reporter: She loads them up and takes them to Aspen, where there will be two different Thanksgiving feasts today. The first is in time for employees who started work at four am this morning.

DeCillis: “I try to get the food to Rubey Park by nine o’clock so the people who are just start leaving their shifts can get some food before they go. And then I bring the second shift in around five thirty, six o’clock.”

Reporter:  Some of that food will be sent down to mechanics and other workers in Glenwood Springs so no one gets left out. And everyone gets leftovers. DeCillis is co-owner of The Upper Crust, a restaurant and baking business with locations in El Jebel and Aspen. She squeezed the RFTA Thanksgiving feast in with her usual business orders. Years ago, she worked both jobs... And that’s when her Thanksgiving tradition began.

DeCillis: “I started that when I worked for RFTA, I worked at Rubey Park for nine years. That was my family, you know, so I offered to cook dinner for everybody and it turned into cooking dinner for all of RFTA. The mechanics, the day people, the night people. And I’ve been doing it for… let’s see...probably like fifteen years, I think. Sixteen years.”

Reporter: And she does Christmas dinner for RFTA, too. Today. DeCillis says it’ll be easy to spot her as she’s bringing the first round of dinner to Rubey Park.

DeCillis: “On Thanksgiving morning, the car with all the fogged up windows, that’s me!”

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