What Do I Feed These People?
If your guests will be there between 8 and 10 A.M., you'd better serve breakfast. If they're there between noon and 1, plan to serve them lunch (a cold cuts buffet is fine). If they are there after work, and it's for more than drinks, plan on feeding them dinner. If it's after the "American dinner hour" (which means after 6:30 P.M.), they will likely all have already eaten and only expect cake and beverages. Any other time, snacks are totally appropriate, and cake is required.
Planning Your Menu
If you are hosting a shower for a friend who is kosher, vegetarian, vegan, or some other religious and/or dietetic discipline, it would be thoughtful of you to be considerate. Ask the bride, for instance, if she cares if you serve shrimp to the nonkosher guests, or red meat to the nonvegetarians. If a preponderance of your guests are of one dietetic persuasion or another, you would be wise to get some recipes from someone so you can cater it to everyone's liking.
Designing the Menu
Take your time designing the menu for the shower. If you are planning to serve something more than cake and cookies, you will need to plan out what you want so that your meal not only looks balanced but elegant, too. Your goal is to create the most wonderful dishes, probably with a minimum of expense. Planning ahead is what will make that happen.
Certain foods are associated with certain activities -- peanuts and hot dogs at ball games, for instance. Your first step is to think about what foods mean something to you -- which ones would fit in best with the theme of the party you are planning? If you are having a Hawaiian party, you would necessarily choose foods that have a Polynesian flair -- things like sweet-and-sour meatballs with pineapple chunks, fruit punch, maybe pineapple upside-down cake.
Similarly, if the party is themed on a country or ethnic group, the food would probably be comfortably representative of that region.
The easiest way to serve food for more than six guests is a buffet. I will assume you are planning to serve whatever you cook buffet style if you are reading this section. (Specific notes for formal, sit-down dinners come later, as well as a brief section on barbecues.) Once you have determined which type of cuisine to feed your guests, you are ready to consider the three most important items in buffet service:
Appearance, flavor, and variety If you are having the event catered, you will have X dollars to feed X people, and that's it. This will greatly limit the amount you can spend. Further, most places will not allow you to supplement their in-house catering department with things you bring in from the outside.
If you are not hiring a caterer, then you will most likely be doing it yourself with some help from your friends. You need to take control of the menu right from the start.
If you are planning on having it potluck, you will need to be extremely specific in the invitations in requesting what it is you want your guests to bring. You will need to determine precisely what you want and then be as specific as possible with your guests. You can even go so far as to send recipe cards and have guests make and bring the item on them. (This is not usually the way to win a popularity contest, however!)
The easiest way to get everything you need is to assign everyone something and give everything a backup. If you tell Jill to bring a green salad and Tonya to bring a green salad, too, the worst that can happen is you end up with two green salads. Otherwise, you can simply do it yourself.
Planning for Variety on Your Buffet Table
Focus on "eye appeal" when you plan any party menu. Think of how the food will actually look when it is sitting on the buffet table or on someone's plate when you are choosing what you want to serve. You will definitely want an interesting variety of colors, textures, flavors, and sizes.
Choose no more than five major dishes for a buffet. That keeps everything much simpler and creates a more elegant appearance. Since you will likely not be hiring anyone to serve the guests as they pass through the line, having more of fewer dishes also motivates people to move through the line faster because they have fewer items to sample.
For a real meal, your dishes would most likely include the following:
- One hot meat dish
- One hot fish or poultry dish
- A starch, ranging from pasta salad, rice, potatoes, or rolls
- A green salad
- Some sort of vegetable dish, either hot or cold
- And for dessert, the cake, possibly with ice cream and/or a fruit salad.
If a budget has you constricted so that you are planning the party at a nonmeal time, or if you simply want to keep it very simple, why not try something like the following hors d'oeuvres menu:
- Crackers or interesting bread
- One or two kinds of cheese (perhaps Brie and Colby)
- An interesting fruit platter or fruit salad
- A vegetable item (even as simple as carrot sticks and dip)
- Some nuts or salty snack food like pretzels
- The cake
How Much Do I Need to Feed Each of Them? How Much Food Does a Typical Woman Eat?
The typical American female eats precisely 7.0287 ounces of food at a wedding shower, not counting the obligatory piece of cake. OK, I made that up. Figure 1 1/3 servings per woman. In my own mother's words, "It's better to have too much than to send your guests home hungry." The only time Mama is wrong is if you are hiring a caterer and it's costing you big bucks to be wrong. (But since you have carefully gotten your RSVPs back, you know precisely how many people to plan for.)
If you figure a serving is one hamburger, one chicken breast, one cup of pasta with sauce, and so on, and you plan 1 1/3 servings per person, you will hit it just about perfect. I always consider any dinner a success if I have at least two servings left when the dishes return to the kitchen. (If there were only one serving, you'd figure someone was too polite to eat the last of it but was still hungry.)
If you are serving cold cuts or a buffet, you'd want to roughly calculate 3 ounces of meat per person and 1 1/2 servings of bread.
If you are serving just canapes and deli plates with carrot sticks and other finger food, you can probably figure on about 1 1/2 cups of food, loosely chopped, per person. That will give you a bit extra, but it's easy to figure. For instance, if you can fit one cut-up taquito, a few nuts, three carrot sticks, and two cherry tomatoes into 1 1/2 cups, you've got it about right. (P.S. -- When serving finger foods, use six-inch plates, not the big ones, which encourage waste and screw up your planning per person.) People eat less in the summer and at certain times of day. If you've ever been to a buffet, you may have noticed that the cheap, bulky items are always put first, before the meats and expensive stuff. You can set up your line the same way -- put the pasta and green and fruit salads at the beginning of the line and the meats later.
People, especially women, eat less in public than they might at home, so you can count on that, too. Nobody's likely to waddle away from your buffet with two full plates of chow.
For the cake, plan on everyone taking one piece and there still being a few slices left over.
For beverages, a general rule of thumb is two cups of liquids per person per hour. If we're talking alcohol, it changes, of course, depending on the potency. Two beers in an hour may be reasonable, but so would three ounces of a strong liqueur.
The official guidelines in several catering books, party planning books, and cookbooks say basically this:
- Hors d'oeuvres: 3-4 per person per hour
- Meat, poultry, and fish: About 3 oz. per person
- Fruit salad: 4-6 oz. per person
- All other kinds of salad: About 2 oz. per person
- Breads, rolls, etc.: 1-1 1/2 servings per person (make sure you slice breads in advance).
- Dessert: One slice of cake per person
Can I Do This Potluck?
Dreams come true! Everyone brings something and you don't have to worry! But don't take the huge risk of allowing people to choose for themselves what they want to bring. No! On the invitations, you must write clearly, "Please bring a green salad that will serve 10 people" or "Please bring 2 quarts of pineapple juice" or you will end up with twenty-five bags of chips!
How Can I Feed These People Cheaply and Still Make It Look Nice?
In California, we have a wonderful place called "Smart&Final." This is a place where the restaurants go to get their bulk supplies. Check your Yellow Pages under "Restaurant Supplies." If that doesn't work, see if you can find a Price Club or a Costco or one of their many competitors nearby. It may well be worth the lack of service, long lines, and the price of a membership card to shop for the party there. Buy the things you don't like to make. If you can shape hamburger patties but wouldn't get a kick out of making your own BBQ sauce, buy the sauce and save the money by buying the meat in bulk.
When you write your shopping list, write down the quantities you need of each item by using the provided measurements as rules of thumb. When you shop, decide where to cut corners to save yourself time. In general, buy higher-quality cheeses and meats and breads, and you can buy the less-expensive condiments and peripheral stuff.
I Don't Have Much Time to Cook the Day of the Party. Now What?
If you are running out of time, or know you will be rushed the day of the party, buy some eternal favorites like potato chips and pretzels and dump them into pretty bowls. People love snack foods. And your job does not include serving things that would fit nicely onto the food pyramid. This is a party, you can be liberal. It's OK to choose things that are prepackaged.
If you're really short on time and money, for a nice luncheon buffet, follow this 10-Step "You're-an-Amazing-Hostess" Shopping Plan:
- Go to your local grocery store a few days early and see if they can put together a few platters of cut-up vegetables (carrots, celery, jicama, broccoli, etc.) with some sort of dip if the dip is included. (If it's extra, they have great ones in the dairy case.) Pick up the platters on the day of the party. Or buy the veggies loose.
- If you have fifteen women coming, go buy yourself two or three bags of chips--corn chips, Doritos, potato chips, whatever. Get the yummy kind.
- Buy a block of Velveeta cheese, a can of diced stewed tomatoes with onions, and two cans of refried beans.
- Buy three ounces of different kinds of cold cuts for each room. (That's forty-five ounces for fifteen women, which is about three pounds.)
- Buy some presliced cheese or get the deli guy to slice it for you.
- Buy twenty-two different kinds of sandwich rolls, a jar of interesting mustard, and some basic mayo and American mustard.
- Buy a head of Romaine lettuce, a bunch of parsley, an orange, and a lemon.
- Go pick up the cake in the bakery department that you ordered two weeks ago.
- Buy two cans of pineapple juice, two quarts of 7-Up, one can of Hawaiian punch.
- Go home and put it all together yourself as follows:
- Wash the vegetables if you are assembling the platters yourself.
- Get out a big platter or tray and two or three baskets. If you don't have a tray or platter, wrap aluminum foil around a big piece of wood or the side of a cardboard box.
- Chop up the Velveeta into chunks, dump in the beans and tomatoes, and microwave for a few minutes until you can stir it smooth. Set it aside.
- Take the matching paper napkins for the party and line the baskets with them.
- Slap the washed, dried romaine lettuce along the tray or better, with the dark green part along the edges and the bottom parts all in the center.
- Lay the meats and cheeses in an attractive pattern on the platter. I'd probably alter-nate them. Garnish with parsley, two orange slices, and two lemon slices. Put on table.
- Dump the chips into a lined basket, and arrange the bread in the other one or two.
- Put the Velveeta dip into a serving bowl. Stick a sprig of parsley into it and a lemon wedge. (It's good lukewarm, so don't freak out if it cools down!)
- With a rubber spatula, spoon the condiments into small glass bowls. Garnish with parsley.
- Unwrap the vegetable platters and put them on the table.
- In a big punch bowl, mix half of the beverage ingredients you bought. Add the floating ice ring and all the leftover citrus slices you can float on top.
- Put the cake and whatever other table decorations you want to use in a spot of honor on the table. Arrange the paper goods and relax! You've just catered it yourself!
Total estimated time (not including shopping or preordering): 1 1/2 hours.
What Can I Prepare in Advance?
The day before, you can cut up the crudites (cold vegetables like carrots and celery) and put them, wrapped in a damp paper towel, in a plastic bag, or float them in a jar of cold water in the fridge.
You can do any baking that will be necessary for the party. If you are making the cake yourself, definitely bake it the day before. Then, after it cools, brush off the crumbs with a pastry brush and slip it into a plastic bag. Store it in the freezer until three hours before the party. That way, it will be very easy to decorate.
You can wash and store any garnishes you intend to use -- like lettuce, parsley, and so forth. You can make the rice and even the pasta if you add a little oil to keep it moist. Pasta salads should be made the day before to give the flavors time to meld. Marinate your meat now. Chop vegetables to be grilled and seal them in plastic.
What Should I Not Prepare in Advance?
Don't try to make in advance anything made with apples or bananas, like a fruit salad. (In fact, up to an hour before the guests get there, if you have to use an apple or banana for anything, dip the pieces in a solution of one cup of water and the juice of half a lemon.)
Do not slice any baked goods until a few hours before the party.
Unless you and your freezer understand each other extremely well, you should not attempt to create any frozen desserts, like an ice cream pie or whipped cream for strawberry shortcake, prior to the event. The temperature is almost never right when you go to serve it.
Don't mix the punch or add ice to anything until moments before the guests arrive.
Don't get all mayonnaise-d out before the shower and end up giving people salmonella. Keep anything with mayo in the fridge until the last minute.
How Do I Make a Shower Cake Easily and Fast?
It's a lot of fun to make and decorate your own cake, and cheaper, too. If easy is called for, get a cake mix in chocolate or vanilla. If you get chocolate, add 1/2 cup of chocolate chips to the mix right before you pour it into the pan. If you use vanilla, throw in 1 cup of frozen raspberries or raisins or diced peaches.
For the filling, try pudding or jam instead of the frosting that you can buy premade. I always make my own frosting, but if you don't want to, those little tubs of it work great. Figure it will take two of them to neatly cover a nine-inch layer cake. Freeze the cake when it's cooled from the oven (the day before the shower). Then, while it's still frozen, brush off any crumbs with a pastry brush. Frost it while it's thawing. (It takes it about three hours to thaw if it's not assembled. Frost it cold, especially if it's hot in your house!) Smear frosting on with the flat side of a table knife. Work from the top down -- dump lots of frosting on the top and smooth it over the edges. Once it's over the edges, come around with the flat side of the knife again to make it perfect.
With a few metal spatulas, lift the cake onto a clean plate for final decorating. (That's how I do it -- my cake-decorating teacher had much more fancy ideas about using waxed paper rings before you ice it.)
If you're adventurous in the kitchen, you probably already know how to make scallops and loops around the edges with a bag of icing. If you don't, just smooth out the icing as best you can. Sprinkle it with something interesting, like candy hearts (very appropriate) or colored candy beads. Be creative!
What You'll Need to Make a Shower Cake
- 1 box of cake mix
- 2 tubs of frosting (get white frosting and some food coloring if they don't have frosting in the color you want)
- 2 layer pans for cakes
- About 1/2 cup of flour, for flouring the pans
- A bit of butter or some no-stick cooking spray
- A butter knife
- A serving plate
- Sprinkles, chocolate kisses, or colored candies
- A tube of decorating gel
- A plastic ornament tied to the shower's theme
How Do I Buy a Shower Cake?
Call four local bakeries, including the one at your local grocery store, to find one who promises you the best shower cake. Drop by to look at their pictures of cakes they've made. Taste something they've baked. If it has that weird lard aftertaste, skip them.
When you find a design you like and a price that fits your budget, order the cake. Expect to put down 50 percent of the final price. Some places will deliver it to your shower location -- wouldn't that be nice? Imagine driving with the cake in your car! You should order the cake at least two weeks in advance, and you should know when you order it how many people you will want it to serve. A basic round layer cake serves eight to ten people. An 11"x9"x2" sheet cake (the proper term for flat cakes) will service fifteen people fairly easily. Don't let the baker talk you into ordering too much cake!
Is Alcohol Appropriate or Required?
Serving alcohol is never required, but it is mandatory that you provide nonalcoholic beverages if you are serving liquor. It's also a nice touch to have a pitcher of water with a floating lemon slice in it on the table. But unless you'd like to spend the big bucks, it's far easier to spike the punch than to provide beer or wine or champagne for the whole crew.
Although most wedding showers feature nonalcoholic beverages, you might choose to add some alcoholic ones to your party. The only rule about alcohol at parties is that the hostess must watch for overconsumption and take appropriate measures to avert disaster.
Many cookbooks offer splendid recipes for alcoholic punches. For a party of all women, you would likely choose a light, fruity alcoholic punch. Generally, the amounts you should plan on are as follows:
- 1 bottle of wine = 6-8 filled glasses
- 1 quart of hard liquor = 20 1 1/2-oz. drinks
- 1 20-oz. bottle of champagne = 8 glasses
- 1/2 keg of beer = 260 8-oz. glasses
- 2 gallons of punch = 64 4-oz. punch cups
Nonalcoholic Drinks
As more and more people become health conscious, fewer and fewer drink alcohol. Either way, a good hostess always provides at least some nonalcoholic drinks. The obvious basics are coffee, hot and/or iced tea, and cool water, preferably with a few floating lemon wedges. Other beverages to consider include:
- Lemonade
- Fruit punch
- Sparkling apple juice
- Bottled water
- Soft drinks
- Fruit juice
- Vegetable juice
You'd probably serve any of the above with a few lemon or lime wedges available, or set a punch bowl filled with cans or bottles and ice on the table. Of course, the traditional drink at wedding showers is fruit punch, usually with sherbet floating on top. The recipe follows:
Basic Nonalcoholic Punch
- 2 quarts of lemon-lime soda
- 1 half-gallon of lemon-lime-orange sherbet
- 2 quarts of pineapple juice
- 1 quart of pink grapefruit juice
Mix half now, and half halfway through the party.
What about Catering the Shower?
Catering is a wonderful idea but very expensive. If you want someone to cater your party in your home, be prepared to pay a premium. If you want to have it at an establishment that offers catering, talk to the catering manager there. Be advised that few places that offer catering will allow you to bring in food from the outside, so check first before you decide to cut corners and bring in a cake from the local bakery instead of theirs.
If you are hiring a catering company to come to your house, speak to several of them before you make up your mind. Try to get recommendations of good caterers from friends. Just remember: People aren't coming because you are a gourmet; they're coming because they love the bride. An average catered meal will run you between $17-$32 per person, rule of thumb. The nice thing: They do the dishes!
5 Steps to a Flawless Catered Event:
- If you are using a rented space, confirm that they allow outside caterers, if there are kitchen facilities at the site and if you may use them, who is responsible if something breaks, what they provide, and so forth. They may have their own or preferred caterers.
- Look for a caterer with credentials! Meet four of them at least. Get someone certified by the state you live in as a real, true caterer. Find them through referral or recommendation. Call a few people they use as referrals and actually find out how they liked the service and the food!
- Get it in writing! Find out what the cancellation terms are; how much you have to deposit and when; how many people they will serve and for what price; what food exactly they will serve; if they will provide utensils, plates, etc. Know precisely what you are getting for what you are paying. Know what happens if they cancel or screw up, or if your bride breaks her engagement and you cancel the party. Lots of people have lost money on nonrefundable deposits this way.
- Do you like and trust the caterer? Have you met several of them? Do they make you feel pressured, like they are cramming things down your throat? Trust your instincts! Have you sampled their food?
- How many servers will show up at the event? You need at least two to run a banquet table, at least one bartender/drinks person and two kitchen staff if you're having a buffet meal.
- Who is going to be in charge on the shower day? Will the person you are meeting actually show up? What will they do? What will be required of you, specifically? Get everything in writing. Let me repeat that: Get everything in writing. OK, for the last time, Get everything in writing! (You've been warned.)
Can I Cater Just Part of It?
Absolutely! There's no rule here! Your local deli would love to prepare some cold meat platters, hot dishes, or crudites! This is a great way to save time. Just make sure you confirm the contents of the platter and when you will pick it up. I suggest you pick it up yourself the morning of the shower, because sending someone else might mean the deli sends them home with vegetables when you were expecting a meat tray. The prices for these trays vary widely, but they sure help out in a pinch! Of course, if you have the least bit of artistic flair, you can create great-looking trays much cheaper yourself. Buy some big disposable platters, some precut meats, some radishes and lettuce for garnishes. At $5.99 per pound for cold cuts, you'd still be ahead of the game doing it yourself and rolling and arranging each piece of meat.
Excerpts: From The Everything Wedding Shower Book by Jennifer Jenkins. © 2000 F+W Publications, Inc. Used by permission of Adams Media.
