Enchanting Hostess or Hostzilla

Chances are, if you've been over to our house for a meal, I have it noted in my menu/entertaining diary.  It's not the kind of diary where I recap every thought or conversation.  Mine is more of a snapshot of the meal I planned and executed.

It's working so well for me, I thought I'd pass along my tip since we are upon the holiday entertaining season.

My diary started as a way to focus my preparation for planning a Thanksgiving meal while jotting down a grocery list in a notebook.  The notebook ended up becoming extremely handy keeping me focused while I was in the midst of cooking and serving.

I never really thought of myself as disorganized when it came to entertaining, but in the same token when you have house guests and you get busy chatting, well... the brain has many opportunities to miss something I had intended.  I know what you're thinking; no it has nothing to do with getting older!

On the back end, there have been additional benefits from my notebook.  When one of my guests returns for another evening of wining and dining, I don't repeat myself.  Without my handy notebook, the odds are I admit, I probably wouldn't be able to remember what I served the last time.  Or if the meal was a success or had a nice pairing with a side dish, I will recreate the menu for a new set of guests.

For all the reasons above, my notebook...okay my diary...keeps me calm in the kitchen.  I say, do whatever it takes to maintain that calmness.  The ultimate goal is to create a nice, memorable meal where you can enjoy your guests; not a harried one turning you into hostzilla.

If you want to get a grip in the same way I do when it comes entertaining, here's what I recommend you include:

• Acquire a journal or keep it electronically
• Note the meal being planned (i.e. Cocktails/Appetizers, Dinner, Brunch, etc.)
• Holiday or celebration if relevant
• Guest names
• All dishes and beverages to be served
• Identify the cookbooks, recipe sites, etc. for quick reference
• Ingredients for a run to the store or Farmer's Market
• Optional:  decoration(s), special serving plates, invitations
• Optional:  Room for notes on the meal's pros and cons
• Optional:  if keeping electronically, take pictures

Just think of this as one more step in your Mise En Place.  Do you have any tips that make entertaining a bit easier?

Recipe (Dis)Organization

Unless I am making something insanely simple, most of my kitchen creations start with a recipe.  I have a decent collection of cookbooks, okay, probably more than the average.  But I also source many of my recipes from a variety of other places.

Back in the day before the Internet, I would watch PBS cooking shows and do my best to jot down the recipe as it was playing out on the screen.  Obviously this was before the Internet was used as a supplemental tool to a television show.  Nowadays the Internet has become a great resource for anything I might fancy.  Of course friends and family have shared their recipes with me over the years.  My greatest resource, much to my husband's chagrin, is from my magazines.  I say chagrin because I have difficulty reading through them in a timely fashion.  But once I finish that magazine I'll rip out the recipe for testing and toss the magazine.

All of these pieces of paper sit in pile awaiting their audition in my kitchen.  Once selected for preparation, the audition begins.  As the casting director (my husband is co-casting director) we put the candidate through its paces.  If the outcome is a success, the recipe will be cast for future meals at our table...a repeat performance!

Harnessing all these index cards, notes, printouts etc. has been my challenge.  I've had systems in the past for organizing the recipe cast members, but the last system I put in place is unmanageable.  I started a notebook, with plastic sheets to protect the recipes.  But the order in which everything was filed into this book was in the order in which we tried a recipe.  It's become unwieldy.  I can't lay my hands on recipe for the life of me.  Clearly, I was not applying my mis en place philosophy to my recipe management system.

Mis en place as explained by chef/writer Anthony Bourdain in his memoir, Kitchen Confidential is, "your station, in a state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system. The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it, everything you need during the course of a shift is at the ready at arm's reach. If you let your mis en place run down, get dirty, get disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning."

Some would advise I scan all of these little tiny pieces of paper into my computer and go digital.  My kitchen just isn't large enough to accommodate even the smallest of laptops nor does scanning, naming or filing sound like an efficient solution.  So my spring cleaning project .... organize the notebook into categories as you would find in any decent cookbook.

Knowing when its time to change something that is not working is the first step.  In drawing that conclusion for myself, I realized with all of the other things in the world to worry about, finding a recipe should not be one of them.  On to the second step...doing something about it!