Where To Put All the Food??

AKA “We’re Having a Party, Part 3″

Food preparation was going to take 4 days – Saturday through Tuesday. I do have two refrigerators, and the new one is HUGE, but even so – I had a LOT of food to store both before preparation and after. Where does all that food fit?

Some food wasn’t showing up until the day of the party. My brother-in-law was baking his famous, fantastic pretzels and also his salt sticks. He’d bring them on Tuesday. The bagels would be purchased on Tuesday. The punch and mulled cider couldn’t be assembled until Tuesday. My basement is fairly cool so vegetables that did not need refrigeration could be stored down there. I use my deck as a walk-in freezer for winter parties, but it was getting quite warm that weekend. That meant I could only use the deck for refrigerated (not frozen) items. Using the deck for food (as opposed to beverages) also means I need to come up with some way to keep out the various roaming animals. I wasn’t too worried about the falcon returning nor the roving gangs of deer, but we also have raccoons (known for their dexterity with locked receptacles), ground hogs, squirrels, skunks and cats. It would take a little thought and prevention to use the deck.

I started the baking and food prep on Saturday night, getting cookie dough ready. I got cookie baking done Sunday morning, as well as preparing the quiche dough. I headed out grocery shopping with my sister on Sunday late morning, and then came home and began creating all the various marinades and dressings that we’d need for the entrees. Sunday was also the day to put the turkey in to marinate. I’d seen an appealing marinade on another blog, Cooking Without Limits, and keeping with my “everything different” theme, I suggested to my husband that we use that. He took a look at the Spicy Turkey Breast in Beer Sauce recipe and agreed that, with a few modifications (no bacon for one), it sounded delicious and right for our party.

I’d selected so many of my dishes on the premise that I wanted “finger food” – food that people could pick up and eat while they wandered and talked. I didn’t want a lot of food that required people to sit down and use 2 hands to eat. I had the turkey, the quiche and the bagels/lox/cream cheese for “real” eating. I wanted everything else to be eat-as-you-go and “I’ll just have one more little nosh”. It’s a great idea but getting all that food onto skewers and into little cups takes a LOT OF TIME. It looks so EASY but it is incredibly time consuming. This is where my sister was beyond compare. She sat there at my dining room table slicing and arranging all the crudite. She took home the skewers, the cheese, the basil, the dressing, and the tomatoes and skewered food all through the football game (had her team WON, I’d be putting in a mention of that. But alas, neither of us had winning bowl games this year. 😦 ). Not only did she do all of that labor-intensive work on Monday, she came early Tuesday to help assemble the asian salad cups and other dishes.

Monday was the night I had to utilize the deck for more cold storage. We’d cooked the turkey on Monday so that we could slice it on Tuesday. The wonton cups were made. The cookies I was baking were made (salted tahini chocolate chip cookies). The fruit skewers were done. The crudite cups were assembled. I got out one of my plastic storage bins from the renovation – used to pack up our lives for 6 months 🙂 – and began creating layers within the bin. I made sure to lash down and protect the bin from raccoons once I put it outside.

We prepped for hours. I think I only snapped once. 🙂 My sister and husband might disagree with that. But we hit our deadlines!! My sister was able to get home and see her football game and get out to her New Year’s Eve party. My husband and I made it to our New Year’s dinner OUT – where someone waited on me, and all the food prep was done by someone else out of sight and I didn’t have to do any cleanup beyond using my napkin. I did come home and did a bit more preparation – baking the shortbread cookies and rolling out the quiche dough. I was still awake at midnight to hear the fireworks across the river. The sky was completely overcast so all I could see were the clouds lit by the explosions. Somewhere around 1 am I made it to bed although I make no claims about actually falling asleep. 🙂 My brain was still churning and my bad leg joints had begun to complain. Ah yes, running full throttle!