Cooking for a Crowd

Although I am completely comfortable cooking for my husband, I get a bit shy about cooking for a crowd.  Growing up, I always shied away from the spotlight – the stage manager, the sports manager, never one with all eyes on me – so I guess that makes sense.  People who know me don’t believe my claim to shyness, but it’s there.  So it doesn’t surprise me that cooking for others is not my forte.  Oh sure, I’m fine with a few appetizers when we host a party, but I’m talking about feeding dinner to 10 hungry friends.  And that’s exactly what I’ve done twice in the last 6 weeks.

Mexican Valentine
In mid-February, we had friends from North Carolina in town, and we invited a bunch of people over to celebrate their arrival.  In total, I think we were 13.  Well, I just had to show off my new tortilla press.  My plan was for everyone to press a couple of their own tortillas and make fajitas.  As it turns out, corn tortillas are pretty tough to make (Chuck and I had made flour tortillas, but this was our inaugural corn pressing).  Thanks to Chuck and one unlucky guest who (probably regrettably) volunteered, we made a ton of tortillas.  And people enjoyed chicken and vegetarian fajitas, as well as an enchilada casserole (based loosely on the recipe linked here, but presented as a mexican lasagna), guacamole, and my mother’s pork carnitas (leave a comment if you’d like the recipe).  Everything was a hit, maybe because of the margaritas, but people really seemed to enjoy the food.

Cooking for 10 without a Stove
A couple weeks ago, I went skiing in Vermont with 10 of my closest friends, some of whom I hadn’t met until my arrival at the house we rented.  Fortunately for snow-enthusiasts, Vermont had gotten dumped on (40 inches in 48 hours is pretty serious back east).  Unfortunately, however, that much snow means widespread power outages, and the house we were staying in was in the dark.  Despite the arrival of a generator, we had to be quite conscious of our power consumption, which meant not using the stove or oven.  And I decided to attempt making dinner for everyone.  Call it dinner impossible if you will, but I thought I could provide dinner for 11 using just a grill.  Ha!  To make a long story short, I came home early from snowshoeing, giving me the chance to do my shopping and prep work.  Everyone else came off the slopes a couple hours later and was welcomed with guacamole and shrimp cocktail.  And at 6pm the power came back!  Phew.  By then, I knew cooking steak with onions and peppers, broccoli and red potatoes was a mightier feat than the grill could handle in any reasonable length of time.  And I didn’t want to serve broccoli as a course by itself.  Dinner wasn’t great, but it was good.  And certainly better than anyone else had planned for dinner.

So I’m getting over my fear of cooking for a group.  Sure, I’d love to be a little more refined in my cooking, but I also try to find a balance between the stress of being the perfect hostess and simply serving a good meal for friends.  They seem to appreciate it, and I just need to remember that I will always be my harshest critic.