SC - Scaling up recipes?

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

hey all from Anne-Marie

Ras sez:
>Agreed. I was not insinuating that your experiences in this area were 
>invalid. You, as I do, appear to try to be everywhere in the kitchen at once 
>when doing a large feast. Such attention to detail means the difference 
>between an OK feast and a great feast which I am sure you produce with some 
>regularity. 

aw shucks! :)

>Would you not agree, however, that given the variables which can be caused
by 
>weather as much as any other reason, it is a good thing to just go ahead and 
>scale everything up exactly? It would be far better to have a little extra
to 
>play with if needed than to not have enough ingredients in the long run.

For buying, yes, but since I'm dealing with those enthusiastic but not
particularlly skilled helpers again (many of which appear at the door and
ask to help...who am I to turn them away when we're having all the fun? :))
I must include in the written instructions I hand them what to you and me
is common sense....DONT melt all that fat...use a bit, and if you need more
its there...Buy all the onions and cut 'em up, but dont just blindly put
them in the dish. Look and make sure that the porportions are right. We can
always bag up the extras and give 'em away as door prizes. Ditto apples.
And the ROman feast we did is still known as the Feast of Leeks (somehow we
ended up with CASES of extras. might have been a glitch in the computer
program which was still in its infancy...). Or there was the salat I served
where I did the original with heads of greens from the grocery store, and
when we got the produce from my favorite booth at the market for the feast
they were "nice" and gave us HUGE heads of greens, so we ended up with more
than double the amount of salat. recipes are often tested using grocery
store spice that has sat around in the testers kitchen for a while. For the
banquet we go to Tony the Spice Boy and get fresh ground stuff which is
much more potent. Super fresh ground Tellicherry black pepper almost tastes
like cardamom!

So I guess the rule of thumb is to buy what the recipes scale up to, but
make sure everyone is paying attention. In the written instructions I often
will include "you should have about the same amount of apples and onions",
or "add half the spice. stew for 1/2 hour, then ask Anne-Marie to come and
taste it before you add more". "Use enough butter to coat the pans". athat
kind of thing.

If folks know what they're doing and are paying attention, the worst thing
that happens is that diners get to take home leftover produce as door
prizes, oh darn. I can live with that, as opposed to the alternative, which
is when folks blindly adhere to the written recipe and can get some very
wonky results...

- --AM

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