Dinner for 40

[Malawry]

You absolutely can peel and chop your potatoes the night before. I would. Store them in water in the fridge overnight. I have never tried cutting down the potatoes into small pieces or slices, but if you try it I hope you report back on how it went!

[snowangel]

In ECI's Potato Primer, the potatoes are sliced before boiling. I do it all of the time.

[tammylc]

Well, that's done.

It was quite the production. As the numbers kept rising higher, I started to get worried, and ended up recruiting a bunch of people to help out.

After the adding and the dropping were all said and done, we ended up with 77 people! 41 adult meat eaters, 8 adult vegetarians, 5 teen meat eaters, 8 big kids (over age seven) and 15 little kids (aged six and under). Total food cost was $268.18, which works out to $5.29 per adult, $3.97 per teen, and $2.65 per big kid. A little more expensive than my usual meal, but it was quite a feast.

Everything got done, mostly in time. We were still mashing potatoes and 20 or 25 after, and the last batches definitely had more lumps than the first. But 30 lbs of potatoes is a lot of potatoes! People absolutely raved about the stuffing, but even with people liking it that much we had waaay too much. We also had too much squash - I got all caught up in having all the different kinds and bought more than I should have. There was a little bit of the other things leftover - mashed potatoes, turkey, peas, even gravy (although several tables ran out and just didn't bother trolling for more). 5 pies were enough, especially since we cut them into 12 pieces each.

The menu:

Turkey

Mashed potatoes

Turkey gravy

Mushroom gravy (for the veggies)

Stuffing

Roasted squash

Peas

Stuffed portabellos mushrooms (for the veggies)

The shopping list:

2 Amish "natural" turkeys - one 18.5 lbs and one 19.5 lbs (cooked according to http://www.turkeyhelp.com/turkey_for_a_crowd.htm)

30 lbs of potatoes

15 squash (3 butternut, 3 buttercup, 3 delicata, 3 melon cup and 3 carnival)

4 lbs peas

2 heads celery

12 onions

9 loaves bread (assorted day old Zingerman's bread)

3 lbs walnuts

1.5 lbs pecans

4 pkgs Craisins

1 jar Better than Bouillon Vegetarian

1 lb butter (needed to use extra from the kitchen)

1 quart milk

5 assorted cheap pies

2 cans whipped cream

Last night some neighbors cubed the bread, chopped the onions and peeled the potatoes. This morning I prepped the turkeys and got them into the oven before my husband left for work (so he could watch our 17-month old son while I had my hands full). I put the giblets and veggies and fresh herbs from the garden on to make stock for gravy. Once Liam *finally* took his nap, I cut the squash in half and scooped out the seeds. After he woke up and my babysitter took over, we got the squash brushed with butter and into the oven to roast. At 4 I got my assistants and we started cooking in earnest, I made the gravy, then carved up the turkeys. Meanwhile, one of my assistants took charge of the stuffing, getting sage and thyme and savory from the garden, adding sauteed celery and onions, mixing in the walnuts, pecans and Craisins and adding stock to moisten. We'd been working on and off slicing up the potatoes and eventually got those on to boil. We waited a little too long, unfortunately, since we ended up mashing potatoes up until the last minute. We cut up the squash and put a few different kinds on each platter - it was very pretty! In the end a million people jumped in to help get food out onto tables. I got a huge round of "thanks to the cook" applause, and made sure to get up and thank the cast of thousands that made it possible.

I think I'll aim for some simpler meals for the next little while...

[Schneier]

Congratulations.

[arriba!]

tammylc--I love this thread and am glad I found it! You mentioned early on that you were not sure if anyone was reading--please keep it coming! I have never cooked for more than 16 and am amazed how quickly you can get it together. The next time I feel overwhelmed by a meal, I will think of your meals!

[tammylc]

tammylc--I love this thread and am glad I found it!  You mentioned early on that you were not sure if anyone was reading--please keep it coming!  I have never cooked for more than 16 and am amazed how quickly you can get it together.  The next time I feel overwhelmed by a meal, I will think of your meals!

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Aww, thanks, you're very sweet.

While I'm the crazy mastermind, I do have assistants to help me get it together, thank goodness!

Next up - Beef Burgundy, a rerun from last winter. And after that we're into a whole new work season, so I don't have any of my meals scheduled yet. Anyone have any ideas, recommendations or requests?

[arriba!]

What about chicken and dumplings? I use frozen dumplings(Red Kettle I think) and they are good. I am really on a quest for the wonderful cloud-like puffs that float on top of the simmering stock but have not found the perfect technique for that. I like this best the 2nd day which is not practical for you, but you could probably make it work within your timeframe. Since you and your guests like foods of the world, how about chilaquiles--Mexican casserole of tortillas, meat of your choice(or none), canned green chilies? You could season it to suit your crowd and add as much cheese as they would like.

Moussaka or pastistio? Is Shepherd's Pie just too predictable? A lot of meat, I know--I depend a lot on meat("I love animals--they taste good"--probably read that on this site!!!)

What about red beans and rice --or my favorite--white beans seasoned like red beans--with rice or without? Cornbread too, of course! Jalapeno is my favorite!

I agree with a previous poster--Chicken Marbella is GREAT and always gets raves. I don't use as much sugar as listed--it browns wonderfully without it. Stunning presentation and GREAT flavors!!! I concentrate pan juices and pass at the table.

Happy cooking!

[tammylc]

I've been busy and totally neglecting this thread. I've been cooking, but mostly doing reruns. Now I find myself at a loss for what to cook for my next few meals, and I'm looking to you all to help reinvigorate me!

Chicken Marbella fans - what would I serve with it? I've seen at least one recommendation for mashed potatoes - what do you think? Any suggestion on a vegetarian main dish that would go well thematically? Or could tofu be done the same way?

Any other suggestions and ideas? Thanks.

[Cleo]

Chicken Marbella fans - what would I serve with it?  I've seen at least one recommendation for mashed potatoes - what do you think?

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What about couscous? I think that would go well with Chicken Marbella.

[chezcherie]

i like orzo or couscous with chix marbella. (love this thread, so thanks---i've gotten a lot of good ideas from it!)

[tammylc]

Okay folks - I need your help. A foodie friend is coming in to town to help me cook common meal next week. We want to do something interesting and out-of-the-ordinary, and still meet our price point of $5/person. Ideally this something will taste good AND look good, as presentation is something that doesn't generally get much play in the common meal setting.

Our original plan was for a stacked entree - crisp polenta topped with mushroom ragu and slices of seared duck breast (or goat cheese for the vegetarians). With roasted brussel sprouts and sweet potatoes and salad on the side. But we can't source duck cheaply enough to make it work, especially since mushrooms are expensive as well.

Your creative ideas are urgently needed!

[tammylc]

No one here had any creative ideas, and my friend and I didn't have any either. So we decided to just make our original plan work. We're downsizing the duck portion per person, and have found a source for cheap button mushrooms that we'll enhance with some dried shiitakes or porcinis. And maybe we'll just "lose" a few receipts - we want to do something fun, but not have it be hardship for other people, so if we pay $20 or $40 for our own entertainment, it's no big deal.

Yesterday I did a test run of the polenta. I've never cooked it before, and needed to get a sense of how quantities would look, and whether Sara Moulton's ultra-easy baked method would do what I needed it to do. Which, I am happy to report, it did. I was not looking forward to stirring an octuple batch of polenta on the stovetop for an hour and a half. This way I can just cook a bunch of individual casserole dishes at the same time.

Still trying to get the form factor right, though. Last night I poured a single batch into a loaf pan. It was easy to slice and portion that way, but I ended up with basically a 4"x2" rectangle, which wasn't really what I was going for. We can either try filling the loaf pan higher to get more of a square shape or using sheet pans, because then we can cut it into any shape we want. Or using skillets or cake pans or something and doing rounds cut into wedges. We still need to decide what will work best.

And we still need to decide if we're going to be wacky enough to actually do individual plating. Since we have to assemble all of the stacks anyway, it's not that big of a deal to do it on individual plates, which lets us have fun with decorative garnishes and sauces. We just need runners to help get it out to tables, but that should be easy to accomplish. We'll serve the side dishes family style, and just plate up the entree - no point in having brussels sprouts go to waste on people who won't eat them!

[Rachel Perlow]

Sorry we didn't come up with something more creative for you, Tammy. But what you are doing sounds good to me.

[arriba!]

I agree! I could not think of anything that sounded as good as what you had planned--sorry! Please let us know how it turns out! Sounds really great!

[tammylc]

Planning proceeds apace for what I have titled "Dinner at the Great Oak Bistro" on our meal sign up web page. I conducted a couple of polenta experiments over the weekend and am confident that I have that part well at hand (I still have a bunch of polenta in the fridge at home, in fact).

I went to Costco on Saturday and picked up a huge container of frozen mini cream puffs to serve for dessert - $10 for 90 pieces. But my real reason for going was the 1 lb bag of dried shiitake mushrooms (also $10). Anyone have any sense of how much this will equate to when rehydrated? We need to figure out how much of the other mushrooms to buy.

Still to come is developing an actual shopping list, but there aren't really many obscure ingredients, so it should be pretty easy.

Last I checked, we had 20 meat eaters, 13 vegetarians and 20 assorted children signed up for dinner. It wouldn't surprise me if we get up to the max of 64.

[tammylc]

Okay, that was REALLY fun.

The menu, which we posted on the usual board and also printed one for each table:

<center><i><b>Dinner at the Great Oak Bistro</b>

Local Amish Duck Breast

~ or ~

Silver Goat Chevre

served on “Grilled” Polenta,

Wild Mushroom Ragu,

Port Wine Reduction,

and Truffle Oil

with

Rosemary Roasted Sweet Potatoes,

Brussels Sprouts,

and

Spring Mix Salad

For the wee ones ~

Mac & Cheese

Steamed Broccoli

Dessert

Cream Puffs</i></center>

(Our audience wasn't experienced enough to note all the fancy restaurant menu in-jokes - listing the provenance, scare quotes - but hopefully y'all appreciated our attempt at humor.)

After figuring out we could accomodate a few late signups, we had 63 people - 26 duck eating adults, 16 cheese eating adults, 2 duck eating kids, 2 cheese eating kids, and 17 other kids. It was important for this meal to figure out in advance if kids would be eating the main meal or not, because we actually did individual PLATING! And as it turned out, someone came who wasn't signed up, or a kid who we weren't planning for took the main meal, because we actually served 47 dishes total. And some people who signed up for cheese must have taken duck, because although I was down for duck, by the time we were done serving, there was just cheese left, when we should have had just enough.

We only plated the main course, and served the sides family style. The plates were quite lovely, and I'm sad that my assistant cook didn't ask "Did you get a picture?" until we were done - I'm sure we could have found somone with a camera phone. We placed a slice of "grilled" (fried, really) polenta in the center of each plate and topped it with a spoonful of mushroom ragu. On top of that went either 2 thick slices of goat cheese (about a 2 oz portion) or 4 slices of duck breast (about half a breast or 4 oz). A drizzle of truffle oil and single chive finished off the top, while an artful drizzle of port wine reduction graced the plate.

It was a long cooking journey, starting last weekend when I did all my polenta experiments. Wednesday night I went to the store to pick up the brand of polenta I'd been working with, and they were totally out! Cramped for time and with toddler in tow, I ended getting the Red Mill Coarse Cornmeal instead of their Polenta. It worked alright, but wasn't as nice.

Wednesday night I cooked up the polenta using Sara Moulton's oven method, then poured them into loaf pans to chill. Even though I was cooking each batch in its own casserole dish, doing four at once per oven did affect the overall cooking time (or maybe it was the change in product?), but I got it done, with only slight worries about the texture on a couple of batches, which was a smidge looser than I'd been using.

Thursday morning I started shopping for the rest of the ingredients, took a detour to the airport to pick up my friend/guest cook, then hit a couple more stores with him in tow. All told, six different stores contributed to the list - Costco, Arbor Farms, Meijer, Sparrow Meat Market, Trader Joes, and Zingerman's!

The shopping list:

Protein:

6 1/2 lbs duck breast (14 half breasts)

3 11-oz pkgs goat cheese

Ragu:

3 14 oz pkgs portabello mushrooms

4 lbs button mushrooms

1 lb bag dried Shiitake mushrooms

3 lb onions

1 head garlic

1 bottle cheap Burgundy from TJ's

Polenta:

5 lbs of coarse cornmeal

1 lb butter (two sticks for the polenta, and the rest got used for other things)

Garnish:

1 bottle white truffle oil

1 bottle cheap port from TJ's (for reduction)

2 pkgs chives

Sides:

16 lbs sweet potatoes

4 lbs brussels sprouts (could have had more - these ran out quickly)

2 lbs spring mix greens

1 pkg rosemary (for the sweet potatoes)

1 bunch parsley (bought this potentially for the ragu, but we didn't like it there, so we sprinkled some on the brussels sprouts)

Kids:

3 boxes Mac and Cheese (should have had four)

2 heads broccoli

2 lbs baby carrots

Total cost: $212.16 or $5.40 per adult (including the 12% pantry fee). Note - I'm only charging for the 1/4 bottle of truffle oil that we used since I'm keeping the rest, but even so, that would have only added another 35 cents to the price.

We stopped for lunch at Zingerman's Roadhouse (smoked goat sandwich - yum!), but then came back to the common house and immediately started cooking. Otherwise we weren't going to have enough stove space, thanks to our too-tightly spaced burners.

We started by setting the port on to reduce - it's pretty amazing watching an entire bottle of port turn into a mere 1/4 cup! Near the very end we had a boil over and lost some volume, so we ran a little short of what we needed to finish all the plates.

For the mushroom ragu we caramelized the onions, and sauteed the mushrooms in small batches to get some good browning. We used about half the shiitakes, soaking them in 12 cups of water, which generated about 8 cups of mushroom stock. Some of the soaked mushrooms were pretty woody/chewy, so I picked through them and chopped up the ones I liked into small pieces, about 3 cups worth. But what we were really after was the fabulous stock, which we combined with about a cup of wine and reduced down to 4 potent cups. I made a roux to thicken the stock and combined it with the mushrooms, onions, garlic. As we adjusted the seasonings we added a little more wine, but it was still a very thick and chunky ragu, with not a lot of sauce, which is what we were going for. It was very tasty and got raves - but next time I'd hit it with some balsalmic vinegar at the end, as the overall dish needed more acidity.

The polenta crisped up beautifully, and we kept it warm in a 200 degree oven, as it took about 90 minutes to brown all 48 pieces (12 each from four 9inch by 5inch loaf pans).

Meanwhile, in the other oven, we roasted the sweet potatoes with the rosemary. We had to overfill the pans to get it all in the one oven, so they didn't come out as brown as I would have liked and some were more steamed than roasted, but they tasted good. We'd run out of room for the brussels sprouts, so I took the roasting pan of them over to my house and threw them in my home oven.

Oh, I forgot to mention - about 3:30, one of my assistant cooks calls to tell me she's not going to be able to make it. Assistant cooks start at 4. We had an extra pair of hands because my friend was cooking with me, but we'd counted on having two assistants as well. Fortunately I was able to recruit a few people off and on to help with the prep, plating and serving, and we managed to get everything done on time.

Last thing to be prepped was the duck, which we seared well in cast iron pans then threw in a 350 degree oven until the probe thermometer read 130. We only had a probe in one of the 14 breasts, so there was a fair bit of variation in doneness, and on the whole they tended to be a little overdone. But that was probably for the best in a group probably not used to eating duck.

The duck was finished resting about 6:10, so we dispatched someone to ring the dinner bell and started the plating for service at 6:15. We did it assembly style, laying out 12 plates at a time, then sending runners out to the dining room to deliver. The bulk of people were served by 6:25, although there were a few stragglers that didn't get served until closer to 6:30.

Our portioning was perfect - we had a little bit of mushrooms leftover, but they got scarfed up in short order. All in all, it went quite brilliantly, if I do say so myself. Exhausting, but brilliant. My co-cook and I are already planning to cook "Another Dinner at the Great Oak Bistro" - but not until 2007, we think.

Edited February 25, 2006 by tammylc (log)

[snowangel]

Bravo Tammy! Did the diners appreciate this meal?

And, I can't remember what you usually figure per head. Did you go over?

[tammylc]

Response was definitely positive.

I usually aim for $4/person in raw ingredients, so as to keep it under $5 with the pantry fee. For this meal, we were aiming to keep it under $6. Most people don't start getting concerned about the cost until it gets up to $7 or higher, so this was a great price - we were concerned that we'd have to "lose" some receipts to keep it at the $6 mark, so the fact that we were so much under is amazing.

I made sure to mention the estimated price when I posted the menu, because I knew that based on the description alone, some people might be worried about price.

[Chufi]

Thanks for the report Tammy. I can imagine this was a lot of work.. but it looks like it went very well.

Wednesday night I went to the store to pick up the brand of polenta I'd been working with, and they were totally out! 

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Oh I hate it when that happens. It always makes me mad at the shop: don't you realize I depend on you?

[tammylc]

Wednesday night I went to the store to pick up the brand of polenta I'd been working with, and they were totally out! 

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Oh I hate it when that happens. It always makes me mad at the shop: don't you realize I depend on you?

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I had the same issue when I was buying salad greens. I usually get the big 1 lb pkg of organic spring mix, which is a great deal at $5.99. This week the 5 oz packages were on sale, so they only had those in stock. But even on sale ($2.50 instead of $2.99), it's still more expensive to buy an equivalent amount in the small ones.

It was funny - the produce person that was helping me was commenting on how well the large packages sold at that store, and I'm just betting that having three cohousing communities down the street is to blame. I bet Great Oak is responsible for 6 to 8 1 lb packages a week all on its own.

Edited February 24, 2006 by tammylc (log)

[Schneier]

Nice.

[Dana]

I am definitely stealing the polenta/mushroom ragu' idea!! It sounds so elegant, yet very doable.

This is one of my favorite threads. Thanks so much, Tammy.

[tammylc]

This is one of my favorite threads. Thanks so much, Tammy.

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Thank you! Reading that made my day!

[Rachel Perlow]

It sounds like you had a great time and produced a fabulous meal to boot! Have you raised the groups expectations of your future meals?

[tammylc]

I don't think so. People know that I do these wacky things every once in a while (like cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner for 72 people), but they don't object when I go back to the simpler things later. The cleaners appreciate it!

For my next meal I'm thinking about making a hard boiled egg curry. It's a great recipe - easy and very tasty. The only problem is peeling the ~85 boiled eggs we'd need. It's been suggested that I recruit some of the neighborhood kids to come help, so that might be one way to make it a little easier... Anyone have any tips? I'm thinking I'll buy the eggs in advance and leave them on the counter for a couple of days so they'll age a little, since old eggs are easier to peel.