S15: E6: The Art of Cooking for a Crowd

Cooking for larger groups used to stress me out SO much, but over the years, I've honed my skills in putting food on the table for big groups WITHOUT spending all day in the kitchen. 

In today's episode I'm sharing a few of my favorite old-fashioned strategies for cultivating community with food.

Podcast Episode Highlights

• How cooking for large crowds is an old-fashioned idea
• Goal #1: Staying in the action despite being in the kitchen
• Goal #2: Not expensive, still tasty, and not stressful
• Tip #1: Investing in certain tools
• Tip#2: Food inventory and types of meals
• Tip #3: What to skip...
• Strategy #1: Keep a repertoire of group meals
• Strategy #2: My thoughts on freezing meals ahead of time
• Strategy #3: Maximize your mornings and evenings
• Strategy #4: Using a self-serve buffet style
• Strategy #5: The stone soup approach
• Final thoughts

Resources Mentioned in This Podcast Episode:

Learn more about Meal Craft here: https://mealcraftmethod.com/meal-craft-main177846-9453

My Old-Fashioned on Purpose book: http://oldfashionedbook.com/

OTHER HELPFUL RESOURCES FOR YOUR HOMESTEAD:

• Sign up for weekly musings from my homestead: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
• Get my free homesteading tutorials & recipes here: www.theprairiehomestead.com
• Buy Wyoming-raised, grass-finished beef: http://genuinebeefco.com
• Jill on Instagram: @jill.winger
• Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
• Apply to be a guest on the Old-Fashioned on Purpose podcast: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/podcast-guest-application

Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

So we are coming off of our big annual horsemanship clinic, which is always such a fun time of year. This time around it was eight solid days. We had people come to our homestead from all over. They were camping out. We rode from about 8 am. Sometimes we started at 5 am but we were riding, you know, 10 hoursa day.

Speaker 1: 0:30

It was absolutely glorious, and one of the big aspects of these clinics for me, in addition to being horseback pretty much all day, is that I provide lunch for the crew every single day. I don't have to do that, it's not a requirement, it's just something I enjoy, and I think that coming together to eat once a day just helps make the events a little more connecting. So, anyway, as I was doing a lot of food prep over the last little while especially trying to do food prep in the middle of being outside most of the day, I got to thinking about how this dynamic of cooking for large groups of people is really an old-fashioned one, and I've seen it exhibited in such beautiful ways among the farm and ranch wives in our community. They are pros at cooking large amounts of food. They don't get stressed out and they just make it happen. And so I don't claim to be an expert in this area, but I have learned a few tips and tricks over the years as I've cooked for the clinic and cooked for lots of other big groups. It seems like more and more lately, we're always feeding groups of people and I really enjoy it. So today I wanted to share some of my strategies with you and also encourage you that you know, even if you live in the suburbs or you live in the city, bringing together your neighborhood or your friend group for a meal can be a really wonderful way to connect and engage with those around us, and it doesn't have to be stressful. So let's do this.

Speaker 1: 2:00

Welcome to the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast, the show where we look at what we have left behind as we have raced towards progress and how we can get the good pieces back. I'm your host, jill Winger, and I've been living this homestead lifestyle for a long time, way before. It was cool, and I love to share my revelations and little bits and pieces I've learned about this lifestyle along the way. So it's no secret that cooking for any group, let alone a large group, used to seriously stress me out back in the day, and I had this belief that I had to over prep. I had to be so prepared and I had to have tons of warning and I had to have my house perfectly clean and the food perfectly made, and I've really just basically chilled out over the years in that regard, which has been really, really good for me. I think it's maybe a little bit like exposure therapy you know that technique where if someone has a fear, their therapist exposes them to the fear till they learn how to deal with it. And that's basically kind of what happened to me with cooking for crowds or cooking for a group of people at the last minute. That one really was big and scary to me is I got thrown into those situations so much that I just had to learn how to deal with it and it was the best thing for me. So I've changed a lot over the years in terms of I don't feel like I have to have a perfectly clean house or the perfectly prepared fancy food in order to have a really quality, enriching meal with a group of people.

Speaker 1: 3:28

Now, when I do host whether it's for a group like the clinic, and that was about 15 to 20 people a day that I was feeding or it's a smaller group, like a friend group, which on our friend groups now we have so many children that it's kind of a large group in and of itself. But I have a couple of goals. So, first off, my goal is I want to still be in the action that may be happening that day. Now I love to cook, but I don't like the feeling of being in the kitchen while everybody else is out riding horses or branding calves or building the barn or doing the activity. I want to be out there with them and I also want to eat really good food. So those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive. As I'll share today my other rule, my other goal in cooking for a group is that it can't cost a million dollars, it has to be semi-cost, effective, it has to taste good and I don't want it to stress me out, so I don't want to have to spend three days leading up to an event in order to make it happen. And the clinic we've done clinics for now five years. I've really had to get that piece of it honed in for clinic week because I may have, excuse me, a couple of days leading up to the clinic where I can pre-prep or make big batches, but when we're on day five, six, seven by then, I've been horseback all day, every day, and I can't be in the kitchen leading up to those days to prep the food. So I have to have things that can either be made up way ahead of time and frozen, or they just don't take a lot of brain power on my part. So those are my goals.

Speaker 1: 5:02

So, whether it's something like a clinic or it's branding season, that's a big part of our spring and early summer here in Southeast Wyoming. The neighbor's brand, we all share help and then we eat. Everyone goes to a brand name because you know the food's going to be good. And there's a lot of other opportunities in this homestead life where you may have groups of people over and you're still having to do an activity at the same time. Like maybe you're butchering a bunch of chickens and you have a big crowd, but you guys want to eat lunch afterwards, or you're building a barn together or you're building fence, and I love this dynamic. It makes me so happy, it's so old fashioned and beautiful and there's ways we can do it that we kind of can have our cake and eat it too.

Speaker 1: 5:45

I also still maintain and you've heard me talk about this before that food is just such an important piece of bringing people together, and so I think one of my favorite ways to get to know new folks in our community is to not just have them over for supper, but to invite them into an environment where we are doing a project together and then to end that project with food. Food just is that secret sauce that makes it feel more special, and so, with all that in mind, here are some of the strategies I use to make this happen. And remember, you can do this no matter where you live. I don't care if you're in the middle of a city. Start thinking of ways you can bring the people around you together for a meal. It just feels good, all right.

Speaker 1: 6:28

So the first piece of this is you're going to want to start investing in certain tools. They don't have to be expensive, they don't have to be elaborate, but there are a few things that I've acquired over the years that have made this process of cooking for groups or cooking for, you know, even smaller groups a lot easier. So the first piece is one that would trip me up a lot, because when I would go to host, I would always feel like I was out of paper plates, I was out of plastic silverware, and for me that necessitates a trip to town which can take half a day, and so I would always feel like I couldn't host because I didn't have the right dinnerware. And so I decided a number of years ago to eliminate that problem and also eliminate a lot of waste, because I hate when you have a group and then you're filming like giant trash bags full of paper plates and cups. So quite a while ago I invested in some enamel plates, like they're metal with enamel coating. They're super cute, like I could. You could use them for a photo shoot. They just look good. But they stack really, really small. Once you know you have 20 plates in a stack, they don't take up much room. They're kind of like camp plates. So I grabbed some of those. They weren't super cheap, like I, they were a little bit of an investment. But I've been using them now for five years and they're going to, they're going strong. So that has eliminated probably hundreds and hundreds of paper plates over the years. So that was definitely worth it.

Speaker 1: 7:48

Another thing I did so I wouldn't have to keep buying plastic. You know, silverware, whatever it's called plasticware forks and spoons is. I went to the thrift store and I bought a whole bunch of mismatched forks, spoons and knives. They're totally eclectic, I don't care. I have a cute little caddy and I just have. So we have like our silverware that we use normally. I don't have all the silverware together because it would be too much for our daily use, like too many pieces of silverware, but I have it in a caddy and so whenever we have a group I just take the caddy of mismatched thrift store silverware, stick it on the counter and off we go, and I usually have enough, even for groups of 20 to 30.

Speaker 1: 8:27

For cups, that's a little bit trickier, but if I have a moderate size group, I just use pint size mason jars and I have wet erase markers so people can write their name on it. If it's a really really big group, I will admit that I still go ahead and buy plastic cups and just put a Sharpie out so people can write their name. It's hard to find cups that are washable, that stack really nice. I probably should do a little more digging, but that's what I do for cups. And then having a big drink dispenser, for water especially, but you could also put tea or lemonade in it. That's helpful. So we actually borrowed one from the soda fountain. It's one of those big Gatorade like kind of orange insulated ones, not beautiful, but it keeps water really cold and so, for like the clinic, I only have to fill it with ice water about every three days, which cuts down on time. It reduces plastic water bottles.

Speaker 1: 9:18

I just really don't like plastic water bottles, and it's also something we could fill with tea or lemonade, because personally, when I'm hosting a group, I don't like to buy a lot of bottled drinks because it's more costly and there's more waste like trash. So I would prefer to make big batches of iced tea, big batches of lemonade and water and just do it the old fashioned way, without all of the containers. Okay, so beyond, like the dishes and serving wear, I also have learned to keep a certain supply of pots and pans and serving dishes, and so I find I can never have enough nine by thirteens or pans in that realm of size for large groups, and sometimes it feels like an excessive amount during the quieter times of year, but, like during clinic week or branding season, I'm using all the nine by thirteens I have. So I've collected those in various forms over the years, whether it's Goodwill or garage sales. Tj Maxx in my area is a really good place to find decently priced bakeware or cookingware. So I don't know if you have that store where you are or Ross or whatever, but that's one of my favorite places to check. I also have a lot of bowls because you know it's going to be salads, it's going to be, you know, fruit and vegetables and all sorts of things in the bowls. So you can't have really too many bowls. Also, make sure you have some that are not breakable. So if you're transporting, like when we go to a branding, I always take my metal bowls, not my glass ones, because they're bumping around in the truck on the way to the inn.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Half sheet pans are a lifesaver. So when I'm cooking for a large group I usually don't do a ton of nine by 13 desserts. You can, it's just you need more nine by 13s to get quantity. So a half sheet pan is magical because you can make cakes or brownies or giant cookie bars and you can cut them. I mean you can get 40 or 50 servings out of a half sheet. So if you Google sheet cakes, sometimes people call the cakes in a 9 by 13 pan, a sheet cake, which is fine, but technically a sheet cake is in a sheet pan, so they're a little thinner, but you just get more quantity and there's a million different recipes out there and I've had really good results with that. So get a number of those. Of course, a crock pot super handy and then a roaster oven. I find I use those a lot for branding and I guess there would be, you know, different types of events where some you're going to be hosting at your, your home, others you may be transporting. But, yeah, it pays to have those sorts of appliances that can hold your food at temperature while you're off doing other things. We're going to talk about that more in a moment. So, okay, so those are the tools, and I'm sure there's others, but those are the big ones.

Speaker 1: 12:00

Next, I want to talk about the kind of the food I like to keep on hand, because, again, there's two types of events. There's the ones that I plan for well in advance, like the clinic. Then there's ones that I oh, you're having 10 people over for supper and you need to make something quickly and kind of pull it out of your hat and you don't have time to go to town. That does happen to me quite a bit as well, and so in those dynamics I have my repertoire of meals. I've talked about that before. I even have places in the Old Fashioned On Purpose Planner where we can have our repertoires listed out. But I have certain dishes I know I can make with whatever I have on hand quickly, so the things I keep in my food inventory to make that happen.

Speaker 1: 12:40

I always have a lot of meat and I know that depends on your freezer space. But of course we're raising our own cattle and chickens and pork so I naturally have a lot of stock of those items and that's really important. Ground beef is always a safe bet If you need something quick, packaged in one pound packages, and we have our butcher. Does vacuum seal? I know some people prefer paper, some people prefer the vacuum seal. You know six to one half dozen of the other. But I like the vacuum seal packages because I can put it in a bowl of hot water and have meat mostly defrosted within 20 to 30 minutes and that's important. If I know I'm feeding a crowd I can't tell you how many times where it's four o'clock I kind of have dinner plans but they're not like super cemented and my husband's like, oh my gosh, are you okay if so-and-so stays for supper? And I'm like sure, and I'm like running to the freezer and defrosting quickly. So have meat that you can easily pull out. Roasts are not going to be as friendly to quick defrosting, obviously you.

Speaker 1: 13:48

I always keep potatoes and onions, plenty of them in the pantry. I can pull those together quickly. I can make oven fries as a side. I could put them in the instant pot if I need to make mashed potatoes quickly. So those are great in a pinch.

Speaker 1: 14:02

Naturally, flour, lots of flour, on hand. Of course I have my specialty flours, my wheat berries and all those fancy things that I dabble with that I talk about on other episodes, my wheat berries and all those fancy things that I dabble with that I talk about on other episodes. But I will get a 25 pound bag of all purpose flour or a 50 pound bag from Azure and keep it in buckets in my basement, because sometimes I need to make some sort of baked good quickly and whole wheat flour is a little trickier for that. You may or may not be able to get that done in the time you have, and so I'm not afraid to pull out the regular yeast and the regular flour if needed. You know, an example would be I know I have people coming over. We're going to do burgers. I don't have time to go to the store to get buns, so I decide to make buns. I can pull those out in usually about an hour and a half, maybe a little more, with some all-purpose flour and some yeast. No, they're not a sourdough, no, they're not whole wheat, but it works right. So there's times to compromise.

Speaker 1: 14:59

Also, being able to throw together quick desserts brownies, cookies, bars, cakes, pies that is super important too with your flour and baking stuff. So I'm always keeping that on hand with the knowledge I may need it in a pinch. Of course there's a lot of other things too, but I think the other big category on this list would be fresh fruit and vegetables, kind of depending on the season and the garden. So that's a moving target, but I do try to have, you know, of course, the potatoes and onions, but also, if it's summer I'm going to have watermelon, I'm going to have some peaches or nectarines on hand. If it's winter, I may be leaning more on my frozen fruits or my canned fruits. I always grab the bigger boxes of frozen berries from Azure Standard and I know, if I had to, I could pull that out and make a quick pie or a cobbler if I needed a dessert, something like that. So I just kind of know in the back of my head what I have in the garden that I could use as produce, what I have in the fridge and the freezer, and then what I have to pull it, you know, in the pantry is in jars to pull together for a quick side or a quick dessert. So again, your inventory really varies, but that's at least the baseline I like to have. Okay, so there's the tools I have, there's the food inventory I keep. Before I get into kind of my more specific strategies, there are a few things I skip Generally this is not hard and fast dogma.

Speaker 1: 16:20

There's a few things I skip when it comes to large groups because they tend to be either more difficult or much more expensive. So a big one is chips. I often just don't do chips. Now, if I had a little group, I'm not afraid to put a bag of potato chips out with burgers or whatever, or tortilla chips with tacos, but if you're serving a larger crowd they get really expensive, like you go. Price chips right now, holy moly, they're through the roof. So if you're buying those in quantity, also in groups, people just fill up on those and it just is pricey. So I skip the chips and I do other sides, whether it's coleslaw, potato salad, pasta salad, fruit salad Right now watermelon is a safe bet for everything right, veggie platter. So there's plenty of other sides that you can put together that are much more cost effective.

Speaker 1: 17:06

Another thing I skip generally again, not hard and fast, but for most of the time I skip the pre-made desserts. I know that it's really common. You just get a thing of brownies from the bakery or a thing of cookies from the bakery Can. There's no shame in that, but you're going to save money for a large crowd if you can just make a sheet pancake or you can make a big thing of cookies or bars. It's going to be more cost effective and it tastes better too, and that does count for something.

Speaker 1: 17:40

Another thing I do skip, or something I'm really particular about when I'm planning a large group meal, is I've learned which items are more prep heavy, even if they don't appear so at first glance, and which ones are less, and so I generally always avoid anything that requires a lot of individual attention, like if it's in individual dishes or individual trays, or like what I'm thinking of as pizza. Right, when you're ordering pizza from the pizza store, it's a quick, easy meal. Homemade pizzas. They're fun to make. I love making homemade pizza. But if I'm serving a group of 20 and I'm not able to be in the kitchen, that's a horrible idea, right, because I have to bake one or two pizzas at a time. It takes a lot of labor right before it's served to get it ready to put on the table, and that's difficult. So I'm skipping those items that require that individual attention, because they just don't work well if you're trying to be in on the action of the day and get the food on the table. Now, one exception to that would be if you have a more small to medium group and you need an icebreaker activity Pizzas or something in that realm calzones, you know, personalized things can be a really good way to create that connection and reduce the awkwardness of a new situation.

Speaker 1: 19:01

So one I've been playing with a lot lately, because it's so hot, is grilled pizza, and I actually have a framework for this in the latest edition of Meal Craft. So if you're a Meal Craft member you can go check it out. But when you do that, you can have your guests maybe even help you press the dough onto a parchment or a pizza peel, they can top it and then you're carrying it outside to the grill and it's just that fun dynamic that just helps people relax in a new situation. So that would be the exception, but for the most part I'm not doing those labor-intensive things for a large group. Okay, so those are my big picture ideas and my inventory plans and things like that.

Speaker 1: 19:41

So let's get into some of the more specific strategies. So number one and I mentioned this earlier but I want to dive into it a little deeper because this is really important keep a repertoire of big group meals. Just have a list, put it inside your cabinet, tape it on the door, have it in a binder, put it in your old fashioned on purpose planner. You will forget I forget year to year at brandings or the clinics, like what we did if I don't look at my list. And so just have that written down so you can jump in on a moment's notice and make it happen. Some of the meals on my list would be shredded beef or pork. I love just.

Speaker 1: 20:19

We have so many roasts right Pork roast, beef roast from the animals we raise so I can cook those a day or two ahead of time. I love ahead of time is the key here. Day or two ahead of time, let it cool enough to shred it, and then you can just put all the shredded meat back in the crock pot or in the fridge overnight and then the day you're serving it put it in a crock pot or a roaster just to keep it warm, and then it's buns and barbecue sauce and some sides and you're ready to go. That's one of the easiest meals and it just feels a little more special. Another big one is roast and potatoes. We do that for brandings a lot. Put some beef roast in a roaster oven. You can put potatoes and carrots in there with it. Or you can make mashed potatoes up ahead of time in a crock pot and just have those plugged in while you're doing the jobs. Come in and you have a hot lunch.

Speaker 1: 21:08

I will do lasagna or pasta bakes in some situations. I will do lasagna or pasta bakes in some situations. They're always a crowd pleaser. They're filling right, they feel special.

Speaker 1: 21:17

My biggest issue with lasagna. I was talking to friends about this the other day. It's not a hard meal but it just takes a lot of prep and dishes. And so whenever I make lasagna my whole kitchen is trashed. Every pan, every pot is dirty because you have to have so many different bowls. You know you're browning the meat and you're making the sauce, you're cooking the noodles, maybe you're making the noodles from scratch. It takes even more dishes and then you have the ricotta mixture. It's just so many dishes. So if I have time to make lasagna ahead, I will, and I actually did that for the clinic. We had lasagna the first day because I had time the prior day to prep the lasagna, but I'd never do that the day of because it just is intense for some reason, not hard but just takes effort.

Speaker 1: 21:57

Same goes for pasta bakes. They're a little less finicky than lasagna, but I would say, if you do some sort of pasta dish in a big nine by 13 or a bigger pan, undercook your noodles just slightly, because if it's sitting in your fridge waiting or it's going in the freezer ahead of time which totally works they get a little mushy, they tend to tend towards mush. So undercook your pasta ever so slightly, but that's a good thing. You can freeze uncooked. And what I do love about pasta bakes is you can put that whole dish covered with foil in your oven at a lower temperature than recommended and you have wiggle room on the baking. That's another piece that's really important. I can't have anything. That is something I have to babysit to make sure it's perfectly done right at a certain time. More branding I never know for sure when we'll get done. I usually have a one to two hour window and it's my job as the cook to make sure that the food is perfectly prepared at the exact time. The branding bosses say we're done, which is like a total moving target. It's a little bit of a adrenaline rush. So the good thing about those pastas is put it in 300, put that foil over it. If you go a half hour 40 minutes over that lower temperature it's probably not going to make or break you, but yeah, that's something to consider.

Speaker 1: 23:17

Another option when it's super hot it was super hot last week when we were doing the clinic is a big vat of pasta salad. This is another framework I gave in Meal Craft this year. Now pasta salad is generally considered a side, but if you add enough protein to it, it can be a main dish, and when you let it sit in the fridge, you know well ahead of time it gets really cold. It's extremely refreshing. Serve it with watermelon and fruit on the side. It's filling enough but not heavy. On those hot days you can do a giant bowl of pasta salad and put that out with some different sides.

Speaker 1: 23:50

Spaghetti is a good one. You can cook the noodles up ahead of time and just have your sauce on low in the crock pot. Taco salad is another great one for hot summer days. Have that ready ahead of time. Have some salsas and sour creams and toppings out that. People can kind of doctor it up the way they want Refreshing and cool. Of course, burritos and enchiladas those come together faster than the pasta bakes, but you can still just stick them in your big pans, cover them with foil, freeze them if needed, and then pull them out and bake them lower and slower, and they give you that wiggle room you need as you're waiting for the mealtime to come around.

Speaker 1: 24:29

Oh, another would be a baked potato bar. I love that because, again, as I can prep all the pieces ahead of time, I can have the potatoes in the oven, low temp, and just keep them warm while we're doing our activity. Come in, you know, throw out all the little dishes of toppings, plop the potatoes on the serving area and we're off to the races. So that's another one I really love, and people like to customize their potatoes. It's a fun. It's a fun lunch or supper. Hey friends.

Speaker 1: 24:55

So I'm interrupting this episode for just a second to talk about something that I actually used to be really embarrassed about so much so that I never talked about it publicly and that is the fact that every summer, I would basically completely fall out of love with cooking, so much so that I just didn't want to do it anymore. And I was thinking that I was the only one who felt like that until recently, when I started to share my deep, dark secret online and I found out that many, many of you feel the same way. I think it's just because we have so much going on in the summers that it's just really hard to find that motivation to get in the kitchen and put food on the table. The problem is our people. Well, they still want to eat, unfortunately, so we still have to find ways to nourish them and ourselves in a cost-effective and healthy way. So I've been wrestling with this problem in my own life and for those of you for many years now, trying different things, experimenting with different ideas, and I finally have created something that I think may just help I know it has helped me.

Speaker 1: 25:59

It's called Meal Craft and it's not your typical meal planning system. Rather, it's a set of customizable frameworks that are endlessly flexible, based on what you have in your gardens, your pantries, your freezers, your larders. You don't have to go to the grocery store to do specific shopping trips or anything like that. We're just using what you have, which really is what homesteading is all about. So Mealcraft gives you four new frameworks each month and I'm personally having so much fun with these because they can be different every time Saves me a lot of money, it's reducing the leftovers and the waste that's coming out of my kitchen, and it just makes it a lot more enjoyable. So if you'd like to join us over in Mealcraft over 600 of you have already joined the fun you can visit the link in the show notes to learn more.

Speaker 1: 26:47

Now back to our episode. Okay, my strategy number two I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I want to dig in a little deeper is if you have a multi-day event coming, or even if you don't, even if you just want to be building up your collections, that you have things just in case you can freeze things. My caveat here would be and this is a little bit of a sticking point to me as a recipe creator for the public people want to freeze everything. It's this weird dynamic. I don't know where it comes from, but no matter what recipe I create, people are like can I freeze it? And I'm like, maybe, but should you Not always? You should not always freeze all the things, so maybe you could freeze more than I do. But I find I'm really particular about what I freeze, because food sometimes just isn't the best when it comes out of the freezer. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's not. So, like I mentioned earlier, I'm.

Speaker 1: 27:46

I think you're perfectly safe freezing the pasta dishes. Um, depending on the dish, you might freeze it before you bake it. I think, like lasagna, you're going to assemble the lasagna and then freeze it pre-bake. Same with, like other pasta bakes Burritos and enchiladas freeze well, but I'm careful with other things because sometimes, again, they just are weird coming out of the freezer.

Speaker 1: 28:10

One thing I do find that works really well for freezing ahead are desserts, and so you can do some of those more rich, fluffy, dairy-laden desserts and freeze those For the clinic. This last week I did it like two or three weeks ahead of time I made a bunch of cookie dough balls and you can then just bake those straight from the frozen balls in the oven. You just add a minute or two to the cook time and they work beautifully. Pies are the same way. Make your pie, any pie that you like, and cover it and freeze it unbaked, and then, when it's time to bake it, just stick it in the oven. You're going to have to bake it a little bit more, but they will cook up like they're fresh made that day. You'll never know the difference. Another one would be brownies. You can make brownies, bake them as usual, maybe bake them a minute or two less, and then you can just let those defrost room temperature, cut them up and serve them. They don't get dried out. You won't know the difference, and brownies are always a crowd pleaser.

Speaker 1: 29:17

Okay, so you can be strategic. Whether you know you have an event coming up, you can make a head and freeze if you're super busy right before the event, or even if you don't and you just want to have some extra things in the freezer for those last minute suppers or lunches, when you know, hey, somebody showed up, I want to feed them, but I know my time is going to be limited, the freezer can be your friend, okay. Strategy number three when you know you have a group of people to feed but you don't want to be in the kitchen all day during the event. You want to be out hanging out with the people is you really have to maximize your mornings and your evenings, and that's where that little bit of discipline and planning really makes all the difference. So, for example, clinic week we were going pretty late into the not late, but we were going well into the evening to try to beat the heat. And so sometimes I'd come in at seven or eight at night but I had a little mental list of the things I wanted to prep the next day. Seven or eight at night, but I had a little mental list of the things I wanted to prep the next day.

Speaker 1: 30:19

So I would make sure I had desserts out of the freezer or maybe I'd bake a pie as I was getting ready for bed. Just kind of watch that I would cut up fruit and vegetables. We did a ton of just fresh fruit and veggies because it was so hot here and people just they just really want to eat light when it's that hot. So I'd cut them all up and put them in trays, wrap them and then all I had to do the next day was pull them out. I may be pulling things out of the freezer to defrost, like the lasagnas or the burrito pans. I may try to think what else? Fill up my ice water dispensers, get iced tea started, things like that.

Speaker 1: 30:51

Sometimes I also do that first thing in the morning. I'll just get up a little bit earlier and have that ready. But one of my favorite things to be able to do is, you know, I'm coming in to this lunch scenario with the rest of the crew. If I can just get into the house five minutes before everybody else, I can pull everything out and it looks like I've been in the kitchen all morning and everyone's like, oh, wow, it looks so good. And I'm like, yeah, just a little bit of prep, right. So that's one of my secret tricks not secret. I just make sure I'm really strategic with what needs to happen in the mornings and the evenings on the bookends of that day, and that makes a huge difference in creating a meal that looks like it just magically appeared on the table even though it didn't Okay.

Speaker 1: 31:29

Strategy number four and this is kind of obvious, but I thought it would just I just mentioned it anyway I always always do a self-serve or a buffet approach, so I just put everything out on my kitchen island. If I'm serving at my house, it's harder to do a family style meal because our table's just not huge. So I always just create a buffet. We have drinks on one side and just have people go down the line. That keeps it really simple and it's really fun if you have recipes that allow for it is to have certain meals that are kind of that build-your-own-meal-station vibe, whether it's a salad bar, it's a taco bar, it's a baked potato bar. It's easier for you as the cook, because all you're doing is preparing components instead of combining all of those, and people like that customization, so let them serve themselves. That's easier for you and no one will complain.

Speaker 1: 32:23

And then, lastly, my last strategy that I often use maybe not for things like the clinic or branding, but when we're getting together with our friend group is I love the stone soup approach and I talked about this in old fashioned on purpose. It's such a fun dynamic. You don't always have to be the one that provides all the things and don't be afraid to lean on those in your circles to have them help. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's so many times we're actually doing it. Tonight Even, we're headed to the lake with some friends. None of us have had time to go to the grocery store before we go to the lake and we have like a million children to feed and and lots of people coming. And so last night we were like okay, what do you have? And one friend was like I have a bag of, I have a loaf of bread and a thing of lunch, half a thing of lunch meat. And I'm like well, I have a thing of lunch meat and a half a bag of rolls. And then I'm like oh, I have some vegetables left over. And someone's like I have half a watermelon, and so we're all going to bring random bits and pieces, but that always comes together. It's so fun. I just like that vibe.

Speaker 1: 33:26

And if you don't know why I call it stone soup, there's an old children's tale from a million years ago. That talks about the story of soldiers coming into a village. They were hungry and the villagers were like we don't have anything to feed you, we're out of food. And the soldiers say, okay, that's fine. Well, we're going to make stone soup, and so we have stones and we're going to put them in water and we're going to boil these stones and it's going to be a delicious. Does anyone maybe have a carrot they could add? And so, one by one, the villagers offer a carrot, and then one offers an onion and one offers a cabbage, and what happens is everyone comes together and this amazing soup is created, and it's just a cool story.

Speaker 1: 34:00

But I think about that a lot, especially for those of us who live in these maybe smaller rural communities. We don't have a grocery store down the street, so it takes a lot more effort to make sure we have food in stock on a given time or at a moment's notice. And, yeah, leaning on those around you just helps build that community vibe even stronger. So those are my strategies, friends. Nothing magical, nothing earth shattering, but I've honed them over the years and it works really well and I have found that it's just really fun to eat with people. It's one of my favorite things to do.

Speaker 1: 34:38

Food brings people together like nothing else, and there's something decidedly old-fashioned about it because I think often in modern culture especially if you live in a more populated area when I grow to group functions people just buy the food, they cater it in, or they go to the fast food place and just get a bunch of it, or they go to the bakery and buy a bunch of things, and I'm not shaming that or faulting that at all. But I love the dynamic when people prepare the food with their own hands. You come together, you share what you created. It just changes the energy of an event and it's worth cultivating those skills. So if cooking for crowds stresses you out, I would encourage you to start pushing out of your comfort zone just a little more. See if you can stretch what you thought was possible. Know that it doesn't have to be perfect. Your house doesn't have to be perfectly clean. Nothing has to match and it's all good and people always just appreciate that dynamic of coming together. So I hope that was helpful for you.

Speaker 1: 35:37

Um, if you have any strategies or if you have any recipes that you love to serve to a crowd that I didn't mention today. Please shoot them over to me on Instagram or on Facebook. I'm always looking to add to my collection as I continue to serve more and more groups every year, it feels like and figure out little ways to do it better. So anyway, thanks for listening, friends, and I'll catch up with you on the next episode of Old Fashioned On Purpose.