Supper Club - Closing Thoughts
All the recipes for Supper Club are now up. As desert settles, it is time for some general conclusions.
Originally we thought to limit attendance to 10. This was due more to a lack of glassware and chairs than any other reason. However, given that every single invitee RSVPed within 48 hours of the invite, we decided that we'd squeeze everyone in even if some people had to stand and use paper plates.
Fortunately, neither of those dire circumstances came to pass. gieves and darlox lent us 5 folding chairs and 12 soup bowls. CGM and AM lent us 12 large plates and 12 small plates, plus 3 different baking pans. Thus fortified, we moved our two tables so that were aligned end-to-end and we were able to serve all 15 people in relative comfort. In fact, I'm fairly certain that if we had thrown a card table into the row that we could have pushed it up to 18 people, and with a little finessing we might have been able to stick two card tables in and crack the 20 mark. Of course, this means that we'll never be able to limit our attendance again :-)
As I've noted, some of our prep was done on previous nights, with two dishes being completed and another one requiring only baking by the time Saturday rolled around. With one exception, every dish that required cooking was of the "throw it in the oven and forget it" type. At one point we had four full baking pans in the oven. The major exception was the Spanish Tomato Soup, which was the first thing served so it was already complete when we sat down for dinner. xhollydayx and I were therefore able to enjoy our meal with our guests instead of baby sitting food on the stove. Other than brief jaunts into the kitchen to prep the Crusted Lamb (5 minutes) and the Cream Puffs (another 5 minutes), I was able to stay in the dining room throughout the meal.
You'll note that there are three dishes featuring red, yellow or green peppers. xhollydayx and I both love peppers and eat a lot of them, but it was not our intention to use the peppers as a thematic connector. That was more or less a coincidence. We did intentionally choose dishes with less meat in them, not because we dislike meat but because meat is more expensive and we wanted to have a lot of different items and wine. If we had bought, say, twice as much lamb and chorizo we'd have had to remove several bottles of wines from the menu. I think that it actually worked better this way. Instead of a few large courses, we had many small items, so our guests got to sample extensively without filling up too much on any one item. This also provided a nice safety net, as it mitigated the negative effects of any one items being a disaster.
As it turned out, nothing was a complete disaster. I wouldn't make the sesame bread sticks or the broiled bell pepper tartlets again, but they were certainly edible. Everything else was a clear cut winner.
It took far longer to write up these posts than it did to prepare dinner. Hopefully the next time around the food will be worthy of the same level of anal retentive recording.
Originally we thought to limit attendance to 10. This was due more to a lack of glassware and chairs than any other reason. However, given that every single invitee RSVPed within 48 hours of the invite, we decided that we'd squeeze everyone in even if some people had to stand and use paper plates.
Fortunately, neither of those dire circumstances came to pass. gieves and darlox lent us 5 folding chairs and 12 soup bowls. CGM and AM lent us 12 large plates and 12 small plates, plus 3 different baking pans. Thus fortified, we moved our two tables so that were aligned end-to-end and we were able to serve all 15 people in relative comfort. In fact, I'm fairly certain that if we had thrown a card table into the row that we could have pushed it up to 18 people, and with a little finessing we might have been able to stick two card tables in and crack the 20 mark. Of course, this means that we'll never be able to limit our attendance again :-)
As I've noted, some of our prep was done on previous nights, with two dishes being completed and another one requiring only baking by the time Saturday rolled around. With one exception, every dish that required cooking was of the "throw it in the oven and forget it" type. At one point we had four full baking pans in the oven. The major exception was the Spanish Tomato Soup, which was the first thing served so it was already complete when we sat down for dinner. xhollydayx and I were therefore able to enjoy our meal with our guests instead of baby sitting food on the stove. Other than brief jaunts into the kitchen to prep the Crusted Lamb (5 minutes) and the Cream Puffs (another 5 minutes), I was able to stay in the dining room throughout the meal.
You'll note that there are three dishes featuring red, yellow or green peppers. xhollydayx and I both love peppers and eat a lot of them, but it was not our intention to use the peppers as a thematic connector. That was more or less a coincidence. We did intentionally choose dishes with less meat in them, not because we dislike meat but because meat is more expensive and we wanted to have a lot of different items and wine. If we had bought, say, twice as much lamb and chorizo we'd have had to remove several bottles of wines from the menu. I think that it actually worked better this way. Instead of a few large courses, we had many small items, so our guests got to sample extensively without filling up too much on any one item. This also provided a nice safety net, as it mitigated the negative effects of any one items being a disaster.
As it turned out, nothing was a complete disaster. I wouldn't make the sesame bread sticks or the broiled bell pepper tartlets again, but they were certainly edible. Everything else was a clear cut winner.
It took far longer to write up these posts than it did to prepare dinner. Hopefully the next time around the food will be worthy of the same level of anal retentive recording.