Posts Tagged ‘dinner party’

You probably know how to cook a meal for a group of people. You do not need the many gems of wisdom on offer from Pippa Middleton. Nevertheless, I have a clear and well-defined process for how I prepare for a dinner party, and I thought it might be useful to share that so that we can compare notes.

Decide what to cook well in advance

I do my grocery shop weekly and I don’t really want to have to spend any other time shopping. Therefore, ideally I want to know what I am going to take a week in advance of the event so that I can get it included in that. If I need something fresh I might go out a day or two before to get it, but I want all of the dry and store cupboard ingredients to already be there.

At the planning stage, I make sure everything will work together. Like most people, I have just one oven and four hobs. Therefore everything has to fit on them at one time. This is a limit that is easily reached if you have your starter and your main overlapping.

Draw up a plan

I get pretty detailed with my plan. I tak an A4 sheet and divide it into 5-minute segments. In each of these I can list actions like “turn potato on” and “remove chicken from oven”. If required, I can put multiple columns into the sheet to deal with each part of the meal. This means I don’t have to worry about what I am supposed to be doing while in the heat of battle because I just need to check what is on the plan.

This normally includes two sections before the clock starts rolling: morning prep and evening prep, both discussed below.

The other thing you need is a clock. This is a strange thing to have these days. Many people have replaced their clocks and watches with using their phone to tell the time. However, if you don’t want to be constantly checking your phone every few minutes, you will want a nice big visible clock so you know when each 5-minute segment is up. The solution: more technology. I have an alarm clock on my iPad that I put in a prominent position in the kitchen.

Morning prep

The first stage of prep I do for the party. This is anything that can be done on the morning, or even the day before. This could include baking bread, making a marinade, preparing batter mix for Yorkshires or baking and chilling a dessert.

Evening prep

Second round of prep. This is stuff that I want to do as late as possible, while still doing before my guests arrive. Things like chopping vegetables and pealing potatoes for example. I want to do these as late as possible to keep everything fresh. However, it’s not as important as talking to my guests, so it is stuff I want to get out of the way ideally just before they walk in the door.

This section should include as much stuff as possible, such as:

• Laying the table
• Lighting candles
• Putting some plates in the plate warmer
• Getting all the utensils and making trays out
• Cleaning the kitchen
• Preparing a pan full of potatoes so I can literally just turn the pan on
• Slicing bread

Cleaning

Nobody has a kitchen as big as they would like, so I find it important to keep it as clean and tidy as possible. That means ensuring it is clean and tidy before I start. I make sure that the dishwasher is empty and after it runs its last cycle in the afternoon I tend to wash everything by hand to ensure I have everything I want to hand: the only things that go in there are things I know I definitely will not need.

Then I clean as I go. If I find myself with a spare minute as I bring a pan to boil I will wash something up. Or, when I clear the table I will load it straight into the dishwasher, rather than dumping it on the side for later. This does take a bit of time away from my guests, but also makes for a far less depressing end to the evening when I am left with a far smaller pile of clearing up to do.

For New Year’s Eve we threw a murder mystery dinner party. I’ve previously written about the event and the food I served. Today, I want to talk about the murder mystery and make it available for anyone who is interested.

The script was based around The Brilliant Batsby, a parody on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby. Set in the Roaring Twenties, the plot involves a dozen characters at one of Batsby’s famous parties. A time traveller, Baron von Brown, turns up with proof that Batbsy will be murdered in the future. But which of the guests did it?

Ready for commercial sale it certainly is not. A good boxed murder mystery allows you to work with any number of characters (or without any) and have a different murderer every time. In my script most of the characters are required and the murder is predetermined. All of this is in the dialogue and difficult to change.

Indeed this almost caused me to come unstuck. Originally The Baron was going to turn up with a motion picture device showing a video of Batsby’s murder. However, my original Batsby was ill and so I had to switch the characters around and switch the video to a letter. This resulted in some clumsy dialogue that doesn’t make a lot of sense. However, it is a parody, so best just to go with it.

The characters are:

• The Brilliant Batsby, party host
• Bellina Morgan, wealthy heiress and noted beauty
• Inspector Watt, a police detective
• Baron von Brown, a time traveller from the future
• Mona Moonshine, infamous bootlegger
• Murderous Joe, a convicted criminal
• Chef Gusteau, a chef hired to cater the party
• Professor Laura Craft, archeologist and raider of tombs
• Timothy Timson, Professor Craft’s assistant
• Dr Victor Zoidberg, an Austrian psychologist
• Any number of additional characters

There are a series of 11 dialogues. Each one can be read between courses. However, if by some chance you do not have 11 courses, you could batch them. This makes sense as they are not very long, and sometimes left a conversation gap after they had finished.

If you are interested in having a look, I’ve shared the files: download them here.

For our New Year’s Eve murder mystery dinner party I planned a multi-course meal. To be exact I planned 11 courses. However, everyone was so full after the ninth course that we never made it to the final two.

Here is the menu I served up.

MENU

Wood-smoked salmon pâté
Served on baguette

Goat’s cheese tart
Served with Asian-inspired coleslaw

Mexican tomato and bean soup
Served with maneesh and bloomer

Breaded fish
Served with tomato chutney and lettuce

Yorkshire pudding
Served in a Thai red curry sauce on a steak

Meatballs
Served with slow-cooked ratatouille

Carrot, orange and chervil salad

Fruit pie
Served with honeycomb ice cream

Caramel chocolate shortbread

Cheese board
With crackers and grapes

Tea & coffee
Served with chocolate biscuits

Usually, I would go for a big bang approach with dinner parties. There may or may not be a starter. Most of the food would arrive with the main course, which might consist of multiple potential centrepiece dishes and many different sides.

This was very difficult to do well. The myriad dishes all had to come out hot at the same time. There was competition for attention in those final minutes and a constant strain on hob and oven space. Then you had to fit everything on the table at the same time, as well as people’s plates, and provide implements for serving everything.

My plan on New Year was to avoid all of this. By breaking everything down into small courses I would eliminate many of these problems. There was be less competition for hob and oven space as every course was spaced half an hour apart and prepared one by one. Dishes were then plated up in the kitchen and bought to the table.

Some of the effort was also wiped our by cheating, or arguably careful planning. Many of the dishes were simply cold for example. There were only four hot dishes: the soup, the fish and the two meat courses. The rest were served at room temperature, or chilled (some in my second fridge: the balcony!). I also pressed my slow cooker into use to make the ratatouille. I was able to prepare this hours in advance, slow cook it and have it sat there ready.

The advantages were clear. Each dish got more attention. Everything could be nicely presented. There was no fighting for oven space. Taking the plates to the table meant that were was plenty of space for people’s drinks, bottles of wine and even an array of candles. Many small courses also allows for more variety in the meal.

The disadvantages were reasonably few. It could be that I spent more time at the kitchen rather than at the table, but it did not feel that way. The biggest problem was plates. You need a lot of them. You either need a lot of them, or the ability to wash and dry them quickly. In the end, we used a combination of both.

We bought some high-quality disposable plates. They were made of plastic but easily stood being washed up and re-used. Being plastic I could not warm them, however. We also had to re-use cutlery.

Overall, I think I am a convert to the multi-course meal. The biggest advantage being it takes the pressure off the one big delivery. It also allows you to spend more time crafting small and varied dishes. I suspect 11 is probably a little over the top though…

For New Year’s Eve 2015 we ditched our traditional party format in favour of a murder mystery dinner party. This came with its pros and cons.

On the downside, the logistics of getting everyone round the table complicated matters. We have more friends that would fit round, so I had to omit some people from the invite list. A few people were ill at the last minute, so this further complicated the situation. On the plus side though between the murder mystery and the food, people seemed to be entertained throughout the evening.

The murder mystery itself has lots of room for improvement. The dialogue could probably be condensed into bigger sections, as it was a bit start and stop. That would avoid it breaking into conversation unless there was a length chunky of stuff to do. Once I have cleaned up the typos I will post it on here for other people to look through.

The food went well. We only got through nine of the 11 courses I had planned. Everything went smoothly and it did not feel like much of a rush. Whether that was because I was able to do a lot of the work before, or whether it was because everything was broken down into separate courses rather than one big-bang service, I am not sure. I suspect it is a combination of the two.

We had plenty of left-overs:

Our dinner the day after consisted of smoked-salmon on maneesh, meatballs, breaded fish, gammon and Yorkshires. A mixed grill of left-overs.

Lunch was taken care of by our usual trip for recovery steak. We opted for Miller & Carter because you can always get a table and the food is pretty good. The price of your steak includes chips, salad and sauce, which makes it good value.

Massive success.

Thanks to the hearty contributions of savoury from Anna and sweet from Elina and Gabrielė, we were treated to a rich variety of treats from across Europe. I would have taken some pictures but thanks to the Instragram-generation, you’re now a complete dick if you take a photo of your food.

Instead, here is a picture of a hamster:

A few weeks ago we had a dinner party that was similar to the previous one, except with slightly fewer people and a little bit more food. Or so I thought. Turns out, I did a lot more food.

Thus leaving rather a lot of food left over.

Worked out quite well as I didn’t have to buy sandwiches for a week.

Having been invited for a surprise dinner party by Chris & Cara, we headed over to The Greenhouse – a large apartment development located in Beeston.

If your not familiar with Leeds, you might have heard of Beeston anyway – after all, it’s where the 7-7 bombers came from. It’s also where the football team Leeds United are based, and their accompanying Leeds United Service Crew, often described as the most notorious football hooligans in English history. That explains the two metre high security fence that runs around the perimeter of the complex then.

The idea behind the development is that it is supposed to be eco friendly – which is basically an excuse not to provide any of the tenants with a dishwasher or even a microwave, or anything useful like that.

But enough of bashing where they live. The food itself was outstanding. Individual Beef Wellington’s are always going to work because however much pastry you wrap something up in, you’re still basically serving us steak and there is simply no bad way to do that. Add chocolate cake to the end of that and you have a winning combination. Thumbs up all round.

Having another four day weekend in hand, we decided to throw a last minute soirée on Saturday. Norm did a fantastic job throwing a dinner together and once you throw in some Doctor Who and a few cocktails, you have yourself a winning evening.

On Thursday I hosted a New Year’s Eve midnight dinner party which seemed to go down a storm. It just goes to show that cooking while intoxicated, even to the level where you can’t string a sentence together, it is safe and successful idea.

Sunday being Galileo Day we decided to celebrate in the traditional way with a Galileo Day Feast. Sunday would have provided far too much time to prepare so we held it on Monday night on which I didn’t get home until 6:30 so eating at 8pm wasn’t bad at all.