Menu planning tips to minimize your last minute work

Five Stress-Reducing Tips for Menu Planning

1.Remember Color When you Choose Your Food
It’s easy to choose a number of foods that are delicious, but, oops, when you put them together on a plate, they’re all the same color.

Think of a main course of roast pork, mashed potatoes and cauliflower. Each may be delicious but the presentation will be pale and washed out. Spark up your menu with contrasting colors.

Luckily, vegetables can provide all kinds of colors. Think of orange carrots, green beans, red beets, purple eggplant and golden squash.

2. Do Your Guests Have Any Important Food Issues?
Of course you can’t cater to every single dislike of every guest. But you should check on the more serious issues when you invite people. Unless you already know your guests’ food issues, here are a few questions you should check on:

• Does a guest have any serious allergies?
• Is a guest on an eating regime like low carb or low fat?
• Any other serious issue like vegetarian they would like you to know about?

It’s usually pretty easy to work around the serious issues. If a guest is allergic to seafood, you know you won’t be serving any. These days, extra vegetables usually deal with low carb and vegetarian needs. Most guests will be happy to suggest ways for you to deal with their preferences without disrupting your main menu.

3. Choose a Menu With as Many Make-Ahead Dishes as Possible.
(This is especially true if you are inexperienced at cooking.)

Why Do Make-Ahead Dishes Work So Well To Reduce Your Dinner Party Stress?The more dishes you can prepare a day or some hours before guests ring your doorbell, the more you reduce your stress. Here are some reasons:

• You avoid a last minute crisis if preparation takes longer than you thought it would.
• If you like to cook, you’ll have the leisure to enjoy what you’re doing instead of feeling frantic about a deadline
• You have time to clean up after you cook.
• If there is a disaster, say you burn something, you have plenty of time to come up with an alternate plan.
• If you have prepared the dessert ahead, you don’t need to leave the table for a long stretch just when the conversation is getting really interesting.

I love make -ahead recipes. Here a few of my favorite make-ahead appetizers

4. Never Never Never Do Menu Planning That Includes a Recipe You’re Trying Minutes Before Your Guests Arrive

In fact I would say never try out a new recipe at a dinner party period. Try it out at another meal before your dinner party.

Why? Just review all the reasons above why you should prepare ahead as much as possible.

5. Restrict Your Special Recipes to One or Two Foods
Don’t try do make every dish something special. Most of the time your guests won’t notice that you cooked the beans in champagne instead of water. You’ll be annoyed that you spent the extra money and effort and it will reduce your enjoyment of your own dinner party.

Instead, choose one or two items you will go to town on. Make the rest tasty but simple.

Remember how you feel when you go to somebody else’s place for dinner. Just the fact that someone else is taking the trouble to cook and serve you dinner makes you feel pampered. You don’t need or want every dish to be special. Otherwise it turns into an exercise of continually praising the host or hostess. That can actually detract from people’s enjoyment.

So choose one or two items you want to feature, like a great roast, or a gourmet salad, or a decadent dessert. Then keep the rest simple.

Keep these tips in mind when you start planning your menu, and you can be confident that you are tackling menu planning in an organized way. That means less stress and more enjoyment for you.

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