Healthy budget cooking for 20+ people

It may seem daunting at first, but it shouldn't. It's just a matter of planning and timing. Cooking for 20+ people is fun; the hard part is making THEM do the dishes. We'll be looking at vegetarian or omnivorous cooking for groups of 20-50 people with a $5-$10 budget per guest.

Step one happens on a piece of paper: design a meal that is doable and interesting. Doable means: does it require special cutlery and does it scale or does it just multiply the time needed. For instance, shrimp croquettes can be very nice, but making them is incredibly time consuming, and deep-frying fifty-odd croquettes requires many batches or many deep-fryers. Bad choice. Interesting means: could you find this on the menu in a restaurant, and can you imagine people actually ordering it.

Step two is: calculate weights. Barring professionals, no one has a feeling for how much carrots you need for a pasta meal for 27 people. What you need in the end is about 8 ounces of vegetables per mouth. Carrots and onions are incredibly healthy and are the fundament of most budget meals. So: start with at least 2 ounces of carrots, 2 ounces of onions, and the remainder being equal parts celery, sweet peppers, and whatever accents you choose to express with. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, haricots verts, anything. Multiply these weights by the number of people you are cooking for.

Then, slightly less than 8 ounces of carbohydrates, be it pasta, rice or potatoes. If you are cooking with meat (3-5 ounces a guest), use either ground meat or chunked meat, preferably in inch-long chunks. Having chunks rather than portions allows people to decide how much they want, but true carnivores dislike overly small chunks. When I cook with meat, I generally add it to the vegetables (keeping a portion apart for vegetarians). Keeping the meat separate requires more meat and also some sauce ar garnishing, which is extra work.

Good choices are lettuce with salmon and mustard-honey dressing, salad with mozarella and sun-dried tomatoes, soup, baked mushrooms with blue cheese and/or garlic. Tonight I have a bed of shredded lettuce with some potato salad and three canapes with egg mayonnaise and tapenade.

Potato salad is very doable. Use potatoes that you can eat in the skin. Clean and dice them, and cook them 10-12 minutes (they have to have a bite and not fall apart). In a large bowl mix equal parts mayonnaise and thick yogurt, and add whatever taste takes you fancy. I have garlic and chives, but you can also add gherkins, apple, grated cheese or curry to mention some possibilities. This improves overnight, so you can make it well before.

Tapenade is also extremely doable. Actually I usually make it without olives, so it's something between tapenade and gazpacho. Clean carrots, celery, sweet peppers, cucumber, several cloves of garlic, some tomatoes, and possibly a small piece of onion or leek. Raw onion and leek are very strong, so hold back on them. Worcestershire sauce also goes well with this, but isn't vegetarian. If you need to stack the tapenade (like on a canape) it should be dry, so remove the seeds and goo from the tomatoes and cucumber. Use a (stick) blender to make it into a pulp. Add olive oil (if you are cooking vegetarian, add linseed or similar oil for extra omega 3 fatty acids). Then add balsamic vinegar, Tabasco to taste, soy sauce to taste and possibly ground cloves. Some other time I might add some red wine, lots of tomatoes and water or ice, and call it gazpacho, a starter by itself.

For canapes you can use cucumber slices, about a quarter inch thick. My egg salad today is too liquid with lemon juice, so I use thicker slices which I scooped out a bit. The egg salad is just hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, yogurt, salt, pepper, lemon juice and some sugar.

All in all, two hours work for a fairly complex starter. Cleaning and slicing the vegetables takes most of the time.

If you are in a hurry, go for lettuce with salmon and honey-mustard dressing. Cleaning and shredding iceberg salad takes 5 minutes a head, which serves 5-7. Smoked salmon odd-bits (i.e., what the fishmonger cuts off the expensive beautiful pieces) is fairly inexpensive. Buy about an ounce per guest. Chop them fine and sprinkle a table-spoon or so on each bed of lettuce. If time and budget allow it, add some small mozarella balls (sometimes called perlini -- little pearls). Honey-mustard dressing comes in pint-size plastic bottles which squirt beautifully. All in all about thirty minutes for starters. If you are cooking vegetarian, use sun dried tomatoes with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and garlic dressing.

I'll let you in on a secret: my meals are all largely the same, and yet I am often complimented on my originality. A good budget cook is an illusionist, where texture, spices and little accents give a meal character. So: almost every meal starts with chopping onions, carrots and celery and frying them. Most people don't have a frying pan big enough for 20+ people (I don't), so you have to do this in batches. I use a family-sized wok which is large enough to make 20+ meals in three to four portions, as follows.

It may seem efficient to handle one vegetable at a time, but that doesn't work. The tastes need to mingle. Also it may seem efficient to clean and chop all the vegetables beforehand, but that doesn't work either. Once they are chopped they won't keep. Chopped onions turn bad after an hour or so. So: clean and peel the vegetables but leave them intact.

Chop them in batches as they go in the pan. Here, size matters! Chop everything too fine, and you end up with mush that won't fry, but just boils into baby food. Chop carrots too coarse and they'll be raw and dominate. Ok for some meals, but not for others. There is no optimal size, it depends on the meal. Pasta sauce requires fairly finely chopped vegetables; provencal vegetables are huge chunks of baked onions, carrots, egg-plant, zucchini, peppers and celery, which go well with mashed potatoes (half-cook the carrots before baking to get them just right). If you are using a food processor, use blades to chop the carrots and celery down to rice-kernel sized grains, and use the slicing disc to slice the onions. Fry them together. If you don't have a food processor, start with the celery and the carrots. While they start frying, cut the onions, turning the carrots every now and then to avoid black edges. This way the carrots have time to cook properly.

As the vegetables are frying, turn them regularly while you are chopping the other vegetables. Once the base vegetables are halfway done -- they have shrunk considerably, so there is room, -- you can add other vegetables and meat. Fry the meat beforehand in a frying pan to make sure it is properly cooked and to prevent a drop in temperature of the frying vegetables (which would result in boiled mush).

Now accents can be applied: for pasta, use lots of sweet peppers (not too finely chopped), garlic, and perhaps some hot peppers or Tabasco. Add provencal herbs (or just thyme and oregano). When everything is nearly done, add passata (sieved tomatoes) and red wine to get the right consistency. Heat properly, but don't let this boil. If you like, add olives, anchovies, capers, sweet corn or leek. Not all of them -- that is cacophony, -- just choose an accent.

For moussaka, add lots of egg-plant and perhaps zucchini, and cinnamon and cloves. Strictly speaking, moussaka should go into the oven, but I won't tell if you won't. Fill a chafing dish about 40% with mashed or boiled potatoes, add vegetables as described, and cover with bechamel cheese sauce.

For oriental-style dishes, add bean sprouts, broccoli, water chestnuts, garlic, ginger, pickled onions and lots of sweet soy sauce. If you are cooking with meat chunks, add soy sauce to the meat at the end of frying.

For a middle-eastern touch, add chick peas, lemon juice (or slices on top) and lots of ground cumin, which also goes well with most meats.

Frankly, anything goes. Most dark, white, or green beans. Personally I dislike cabbages, but most things work out well when sufficient bechamel-cheese sauce is added. A nice combo with rice is green peppers, soy sauce, sherry and pineapple, with or without ground meat balls. In any case your vegetables should combine with the carbohydrates you have chosen. Dark or white beans go well with rice, but become pasty with mashed potatoes.

When the first portion is properly done, spoon into a large container (such as a chafing dish) and allow to cool as quickly as possible. In winter, outside, well covered of course, in warmer times in a cellar, if you have one, or in front of an air conditioner. Rinse your wok before the next batch. Each batch takes between half an hour and an hour, including cleaning vegetables; each batch serves 10-12 assuming carbohydrates are done separately.

Most meals keep well for one or two days when refrigerated.

The main difference between vegetarian cooking and omnivorous cooking, apart from the obvious, is the feel of the food. Meat has a very specific bite which overly cooked vegetables lack. To get the texture of minced meat I would use the hardest carrots I can find, chopped in coarse grains, and fried only briefly. They should remain al dente. At the end of frying add quite some soy sauce, and allow to cool quickly. Spoon this through the rest to get a pleasant grainy feel. Also egg plant and certain mushrooms have a tough leathery bite which is essential in some recipies.

Cooking for 20+ probably occurs only every now and then, so a healthy balance of all fatty acids, vitamins and minerals is less a concern than it would be for day to day vegetarian cooking. But if it is, use unheated oils which are rich in omega-3 fatty acids (such as linseed oil); and use flavour-rich ingredients which are rich in vitamin B12 such as marmite (which can easily be added to most vegetables even without people who don't like marmite noticing :-). Use the unheated oils in tapenades, gazpacho or over paste after it has cooled down.

Serving 20+ people takes many hands. I prefer a buffet, which has the added advantage that people can take precisely as much as they want.

A further key advantage is that very often the group you are having dinner with has a program beforehand, be it a walk in the forest, enjoying some performance, or even just drinks and a chat. Chafing dishes and careful timing allow you to participate and still have your meal ready and waiting. A (refrigerated) chafing dish takes about two hours to be ready, without anyone attending! You can also use it to keep barbecued meat, all carbohydrates and much, much more. In the case of rice or pasta, clumping is a concern. For pasta make sure that it is cooked al dente, rinsed thoroughly after cooking, and tossed with (olive) oil. For rice, take very dry cooking rice, and consider frying it with sesame oil and spices.

Starters are a good opportunity to feast the eyes as well as the palate. But if you don't have a refrigerator big enough for 20+ plates, timing is important. Salads will keep two hours, unrefrigerated, but I would never allow fish or anything like that to stand. So: prepare the plates with (cool) sliced iceberg salad beforehand, and add the salmon and dressing just before serving. It only takes a couple of minutes.

All good comes in threes. Personally I do not appreciate deserts, but some do, so I always have yogurt or some pudding or a waffle with whipped cream, or even an ice cream cone.

Secondly, the main course should also come in three. If it's just pasta and sauce, add bowls of grated cheese or preferably a small green salad. If it's just baked provencal vegetables with mashed potatoes, add french bread and garlic mayonnaise (aioli). If it's rice and oriental stew, add prawn crackers and condiments.

But don't overdo it. A few accents are fine, beyond that -- work and budget add up.