Dinner Party Diaries – Volume 1: Issue 14
Somedays I find myself not just planning a lone dinner party. Instead I’m planning what amounts to a series of dinner parties. Some of those times are simply dictated by the scheduled events of a given weekend–hosting friends on Friday, family on Saturday, and cooking for another party on Sunday. Other such instances are common around holidays. However, my most recent example of what I’ll call serial dinner parties was my family vacation to the Outer Banks. We rented a big house, and thirteen of us moved in together for a week. It was a ton of fun, and there was a lot of food consumed. Of course, this was a prime opportunity to cook for a crowd with a variety of dietary preferences, restrictions, and an allergy tossed in–one of my favorite pastimes.
Now, mind you, we didn’t cook dinner every day. However, we did make a few of our tried and true crowd pleasers that I’m always happy to share. You may not find yourself spending a week in a rental house with your family; but many of these recipes make great options for potlucks, summer picnics, cookouts, or your everyday dinner party. 🙂 These recipes all scale up or down fairly easily. (That may be why I chose them for my menus.)
Making Sure You Have Your Kitchen Essentials
When cooking for a crowd, there are a few devices that I find handy to have at my disposal regardless of if I’m in my own kitchen or elsewhere. So . . . we took most of these “essentials” along in our checked luggage. This may sound a bit extreme, but it’s really annoying to not have the right tools for a cooking job. We can both improvise well in the kitchen, but we’d rather not expend that much mental energy while on vacation. Check out my post on Vacation Rental Kitchen Essentials to find out more about some of the items we brought along.
Planning Flexible, Scalable Menus
When planning for serial dinner parties in a location that requires grocery shopping for nearly all of the ingredients, it’s important to be thorough but flexible. You may need to make some gametime changes or decisions on the fly once you are there and see what you are actually working with–both in terms of food and cooking devices.
Here are a few tips:
- Remember Pantry Staple Ingredients
- Don’t forget that you’re going to need some basics like oil for cooking, salt, and pepper. It’s not like at home where you can just assume these things are already there. Either plan to buy them or take them.
- Pre-mix Seasonings / Spices in Advance
- Avoid buying spices that you already have at home or taking your entire spice drawer with you. Figure out what seasonings or spices you are going to need, mix them in advance (if needed), and just pack the mix(es).
- Have a Plan B for Meat and Produce
- It is entirely possible that the store near your vacation rental will not have the exact cut of meat or vegetable that you want. Pick recipes that are flexible so that you can pivot if needed.
- For example: The zucchini in the local store either looks bad or doesn’t exist. Perhaps substitute yellow squash if it’s available. If not, see about broccoli or some other vegetable that can use the same seasoning and cooking method.
- It is entirely possible that the store near your vacation rental will not have the exact cut of meat or vegetable that you want. Pick recipes that are flexible so that you can pivot if needed.
- Pick Recipes that Can Be Adapted to Alternative Cooking Methods
- It’s good to have in mind multiple cooking methods for the same ingredients.
- For example: If one dish (like brownies) is taking longer than expected in the oven, you may want to cook something else (like zucchini) on the grill or stovetop to avoid a time delay.
- It’s good to have in mind multiple cooking methods for the same ingredients.
With those tips (i.e. lessons learned) in mind, we planned out our menus. I wasn’t looking to create new recipes at scale and this isn’t the crowd to use as guinea pigs, so we kept things relatively simple. We planned 3 meals in advance. Then we placed a grocery order for delivery the morning after we arrived with most of the ingredients we needed. As with all of the best laid plans, things change. So in the end, we wound up doing an ad hoc version of an additional dinner, converting one of the planned dinners into a lunch, and adding in a breakfast casserole. It all worked out and no one came even close to starvation. Check out the food below. Even if you aren’t planning food for a family vacation, these are some flexible recipes for any number of occasions.
The Food
Meal 1: Improv Group Dinner
Meal 2: Breakfast Casserole
Meal 3: Planned Dinner – Pork, Veggies, & Cookies
Meal 4: Lunch – Pizza Casserole
Meal 5: Planned Dinner – Pork Tacos, Cauliflower Rice, Mousse
Even if you’re not ready to host serial dinner parties, I hope you try some of these dishes at your next get-together.
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