Dinner Party Menu Planning

Dinner Party Table Setting

Dinner party menu planning for guests, even unexpected ones, is different from everyday meal planning. When planning a dinner party menu for guests, you will want it to be a little more special than what they are used to eating everyday.

The money you spend entertaining should not be enormous, but you do want your guests to feel special. 

Don't feel obligated to give guests expensive dishes when you have to adhere to a budget.

Delicacies like caviar and sushi grade tuna are eaten and appreciated by a small percentage of the general population anyway,so why bother? There is no point to spending money to put those types of food on your table. A better idea would be to substitute food that is reasonable in cost.

When planning a dinner party menu, how about substituting stuffed flank steak for expensive tenderloin? Or serve catfish or Tilapia expertly prepared instead of fussing over lobster and more expensive varieties of seafood. You can always fill people up with less expensive vegetables and starches and use a less expensive cut of meat like pork shoulder or chicken thighs for the entree.

You may want to serve T-Bone steaks with wild mushrooms for the entree, but if your money is funny and your change is strange, you'd be better off serving spaghetti with meat sauce. Round out the menu for your Italian Dinner Party Menu Planning with a garden salad, antipasti platter, garlic bread and a tiramisu or biscotti with coffee for dessert.

Dinner Party menu planning is limited by the type of service and the equipment you have available. Don't put anything on your menu that you can't properly prepare and serve. Keep a good reference cookbook handy just in case you need to produce a substitute for a dish gone wrong.

Even if you are writing adinner party menu for the hundredth time, write it down on a menu form. List your menu items in the order you would like to serve them. Write the menu so that its spacing appears orderly(for plated menus). Every food, accompaniment, relish and sauce which is to be served should be included on the menu. A written menu is far easier to follow than one you are trying to remember.

Variety is one of the most common mistakes in dinner party menu planning. It should be given special consideration by the would-be menu planner. You want to give your guest something familiar, yet something they don't get to have or make for themselves every day.

Unusual foods should not be served in large quantities, even to your own family. They probably won't eat it and you would have wasted your time and money. Everybody knows certain foods are more popular than others. It is wise to make up the main portion of a meal from these foods and use the less popular ones in small portions.

If at all possible, you should try out a new recipe before you plan to serve it to guests. Even when making a recipe you have made many time before, taste, taste, taste!

One of the best ways to prepare a meal that is guaranteed rave reviews, is to experiment with new dishes made from old favorites.

In desserts, for instance, ice cream ranks at the top of the popularity list. There are many unfamiliar, infrequently used frozen desserts. You could try parfaits, bombes and mousses for your next dinner party. A parfait is ice cream served in a tall thin glass. The ice cream may be of several flavors and between the layers is crushed fruit or syrup. A bombe is a combination of ice cream of different flavors or ice cream with a sherbet molded in a special mold which looks like a cantaloupe which has been cut in two lengthwise. A mousse has a whipped cream base, with or without gelatin, into which crushed fruits or flavoring are folded.

Whatever you do, the same food should not be repeated in one meal. For example, tomatoes, the most overworked of foods, may be delicious as soup, sauce and salad but should appear in different meals. I made several entrees for a weekly client once, and I didn't realized until halfway through the cooking process that almost every dish had tomatoes in some form or another. Talk about embarrassing. They probably thought I had stock in del monte or something!

Another important factor in menu planning is texture. The word TEXTURE should be written in big letters in the mind of a menu planner. Any successful meal should be made up of a combination of crisp and soft foods. With soup there are crackers, croutons or cheese straws. When the main dish is cheese souffle, creamy chicken pot pie or some other “non-chewy” combination, the vegetable or salad should be crisp and crunchy.

Food in the same meal should be prepared by different methods - stewing, baking, braising, frying and broiling. This will automatically take care of the texture issue because the way you prepare any food will determine its texture. Lets take chicken, for example. You can fry it for a crunchy crust. Bake it for a crisp skin. Boil and make it into a chicken salad for a softer texture. You get the idea. Don't put too many fried food on your menu though. They must be served right away in most cases. That will prevent you from spending time with your guests. Only prepare one or two fried items and make sure you can hold them for at least 30 minutes without affecting their quality too much. The use of different types of preparation makes for less of a strain on one set of utensils or one part of the stove.