Phyllis’ Blog

Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way about cooking for others — the kind of thing I often wished I could find in some Wise Cookbook somewhere. I hope you find these somewhat random suggestions to be helpful.

Enlarging and Reducing Recipes

1. I often need to enlarge a favorite recipe. Then there are times that I need to reduce a recipe. In general, it’s safe to double or triple the number of ingredients, or cut them in half, if you want to make multiples or a fraction of a recipe. The tricky part is knowing how long to cook or bake the enlarged, or reduced, dish.

I’d recommend cooking the dish 50% longer if you’ve doubled a recipe, and maybe doing it 60-70% longer if you’ve tripled the ingredients. Keep checking how nearly done the dish is once you’ve cooked it longer than the recipe calls for, just to make sure you’re not over-doing it.

2. If you cut the ingredient amounts in half, cook the dish half as long as the recipe calls for. Allow enough time to cook it longer if it isn’t quite done at that point.

3. If you’re doubling or tripling a cake recipe, it’s better to use two 8″ square baking dishes if the original recipe called for one 8″ square dish, rather than putting the doubled batter into a 9″ x 13″ baking dish. Sometimes a cake doesn’t bake fully in the middle if you double or triple the ingredients and put them into a considerably larger baking container.

Cooking for Others

1. When you’re cooking for others, you may want to go light on mushrooms and onions. Lots of guests are cautious about these ingredients. Be careful, too, of including nuts, especially peanuts, and berries with seeds (strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, for example). Lots of people are allergic to these foods.

I think it’s courteous to avoid ingredients that tend to stick in your teeth (like spinach), or garlic, that can do damage to one’s breath!

Also, I usually prepare some vegetarian dishes so that everyone can eat.

2. If you’re hosting a group, as much as possible, choose recipes that allow you to prepare the food the day before the event, or at least several hours before you expect guests to arrive. Be very careful about making things that require last-minute preparations. You want to be ready to greet guests calmly and to answer their questions and needs, rather than being in a panic.

Think through each serving dish that you will need. Make sure you have enough bowls, platters, trays, and serving spoons.

Think about how you will actually serve the food — on a buffet line or by passing the dishes around the table. If a buffet, make sure you have adequate space to place all of the dishes on your buffet/counter area, and that there is enough room for traffic to flow.

If you’re passing serving dishes around the table, should you have two serving bowls for every recipe so that half the table can serve themselves from one bowl, and the other half of the table from the other bowl?

3. When taking food to a potluck, make sure you know how many servings your hostess wants your dish to supply. Ask what the main dish is if you’re asked to bring a salad or a side dish. (If the main dish is pasta-based, you probably should not bring a pasta salad, for example.)

I would also ask if I should check with other guests about what they’ll be bringing so we don’t duplicate.

Plan, too, that your dish is fully prepared when you take it, or that it requires minimal preparation at the event.

4. If you’re organizing a potluck, plan the complete menu, and then make fairly specific assignments to your guests, making sure that the contributors know how many servings their dishes should supply and how their assigned dishes fit into the meal (what the main dish is and what others are bringing so all the dishes work together well).

Keep in mind the fact that your guests will travel with their dishes, so don’t ask the impossible in that regard.

If they are to bring cold dishes, make sure your fridge has space to store the items until mealtime.

If they’re to bring a hot dish, be sure that you have oven or stove space available, or enough electrical outlets to plug in slow cookers.

Now, enjoy your friends — and your food and theirs!