Cocktail Party Porn!

[eri_chan]

Some of you may remmeber that I was asking for recipe ideas for a cocktail party I was throwing for my other half's b-day. Well, the party was this past weekend, and thanks to a couple of great suggestions from people here to round out my menu I think it was a huge success (as the dishes I made based on ideas from you folks were the first to go!

Comments

[eri_chan]

Well, I did a fair amount of advance prep - I made the dumplings/wontons/egg rolls the week before and kept them in the freezer. Similarly most of the dips/spreads were made ahead of time and kept refrigerated. The polenta was made the night before, as was the cake (though I didn't assemble anything until the day of.) The day of the party, we started cooking and assembling things at about noon, and honestly we were working sort of unsteadily right up until about 6:30 (the stuff that was deep fried required my other half and I to double team at the stove, so that meant we couldn't work on anything else...) A lot of that time was spent rewarming and assembling/plating things though, and not really cooking. I suspect if I'd streamlined the process a bit more and figured out ways to do mroe advance prep, we could have knocked it down to a few hours overall rather than what probably amounted to about 15 hours of work all told. I think part of the problem was that a lot of the dishes had to be made right before the party in order to come out right.

As far as cost, it actually wasn't as bad as you might think. The most expensive things were the filet, the shrimp and the various fancy cheeses that I used throughout the menu. A lot of the ingredients were things I keep on hand anyway, and didn't require extra expense.

I imagine I probably spent some where in the neighborhood of $75-100, thought if you had to buy every single ingredient I used from scratch, it would probably be more like $125-150

[eri_chan]

I am scared of deep frying.

Frankly, so am I. It strikes me as dangerous and rather wasteful with all the oil you use and then have to toss, not to mention being so unhealthy.... but I made an exception this once for the sake of the couple of menu items that absolutely required it. Its not something I would EVER do regularly.