Blair and I had some of our neighbors and friends over yesterday for turkey fry and excuse to use our awesome fire pit we got for our wedding. Living in our home for nearly a year now, each gathering has left me with a few lessons for "next time," and last night was no exception.
Lessons learned from previous parties that I employed for our party last night:
1) Yes, the house does need to be clean. However, every single square inch of the house does not need to be spotless: having a new home, and guests that want to tour the house, I always felt pressure to have the home completely spotless from top to bottom. Your guests are your friends and family. They understand you have a life outside of your home and will not be looking in every closet to make sure you are truly organized.
2) It may be a 4-hour party, but it is a several day process: Assuming I can wake up at 4:00 am on the morning of a party to clean the house, plan the menu, go shopping, cook, get dressed, and have enough energy left to to enjoy my guest is not just unrealistic, it is completely impossible! Now, I clean house thoroughly on Wednesday, go shopping on Thursday, prep on Friday, and cook and touch up the house on Saturday.
3) Get it all done in advance: I cook everything in the morning and then reheat it before dinner. The only exception to this is the meat, which we always serve fresh. Yesterday, I started cooking at 8am, and by 2pm I had made the cookies, 2 batches of mac n'cheese, green beans, and glazed carrots, and assembled all of the appetizers. All we had left to do was fry the turkeys.
4) Don't forget about the "stuff": There are a lot of little things that can totally derail the party train- these include rinsing patio furniture, assembling any side tables, etc, setting the tables, setting out the serving dishes and serving utensils, icing down the drinks, etc.
5) Remember to account for your dressing time: It won't matter how the food tastes or how clean the house is, if I am wearing my high school gym shirt, and sweat pants when the guests show up...I can say that this has happened to me, and I put wine guests in my girl's hand while I showered (thankfully, we are close friends and she didn't care).
Ok, so here is the "duh" moment we had yesterday: When cooking for 30 people, make sure you test the gear.
Blair was totally on top of all of the prep, and the turkeys were all marinated well in advance. The birds were happy, and so was he...until it was "go" time. Blair has fried many a turkey, so he had the process mapped to perfection, but neither one of us had thought to try out the fryer in advance. We weren't prepared for it to take a lot longer to heat the oil than the one we had previously used. The turkeys took forever. Fortunately, B is cool as a cucumber and did a great job turning the turkey cook area into a "guy zone" with beers and football and man-cookin'. Thanks to my "man with a plan" and his amazing ability to go with the flow, it all worked out great..but we still took note of the lesson to be learned.
Other lesson- take pictures! Not sure I went through the entire party with my camera sitting on the counter without taking a single pic. Fail.
Ah well! We had a BLAST with friends old and new and left a bit smarter for next time.
Happy Weekend!
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