Souper Bowl, Roadrunner Food Bank, Albuquerque

It was a cupcake of an event. Literally.

Icing was available for the asking, and cupcakes too, but that wasn't the focus of last month's fundraising event at the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The focus was soup. Lots and lots of soup. Creamy this and meaty that, and vegetarian variations too. I had no idea I could get full so quickly. After all, the bowls were sample-size, but that didn't seem to make any difference since there were dozens of soup samplings to taste!

My favorite, hands down, is Kelly's Creamy Green Chili Chicken Soup. I swear it's like pure cream with just the right amount of green chili tossed in around huge chunks of moist chicken breast. I literally crave it now, on a daily basis. And although that would normally not be a huge temptation, since I can walk to Kelly's in about 3 minutes, it's become a real challenge.

The Mayor was there, he made his 1 minute comment. The band was delightful. The people came in droves (thankfully we were part of the first wave of about 50 people and moved through that place at lightening speed - after all, there were chocolate covered strawberries to find).

I would recommend this annual event to anyone and everyone. Dress warm, the warehouse is on the cool side at the beginning of the event, but it warms up as the day progresses.

Kudos to the organizers, the shuttles were there before you even had your car parked, ready and waiting to transport you to the venue. The layout allowed people to move through the booths easily and lines to form without blocking traffic too much. And voting was easy as pie.

My one "hmmm" was over the silent auction tickets. The pricing was such that someone who wanted to spend $40, wouldn't. They would tuck one of those $20 bills back in their pocket, because whether you spent $20 or $40, you got the same number of tickets for the silent auction. If you spent $50, you tripled the number of tickets, but how many people want to spend $50? I think they could have made a lot more money if they had put a bit more thought into their ticket pricing.

Anyway, I loved every minute, slurped every soup, licked the icing off several cupcakes, dropped 10 tickets into the silent auction chests (no call yet, guess I didn't win) and left with a $20 bill in my pocket. It was a souper event.

And Starbucks, I can't forget Starbucks! They had coffee waiting for us as we arrived to stand in line early, and then throughout the day. Thank you, thank you!

And all for a good cause, feeding those whose current situation makes it difficult to even have bread.

How lucky we are.