SC - portion control and planning

[Gaylin J. Walli]

Olwen wrote:

>but you will find that there will always be lots of leftovers and toss outs.

Always? Hmmm. Sometimes not much. In all honesty when I cooked this past
spring, we gauged it so well, that the only thing we had to throw away
was a lot of cold pasta. I took home three pies, a gallon ziploc of gourmet
cheese, and some onions. Not bad for two feasts, above and below, that served
about 210 people overall. Sometimes I plan for extra food based on my
dish size and what me and my expeditor think will make a better looking
dish. In the case of the pasta, we knew the best way to serve one dish
was to use these lovely white trays we had. Pasta was set to be one of the
dishes and also a bed for the veal skewers (Platina's Meat the Roman Way,
from Milham) .... except for one problem.

Pressed into the plastic trays were these rather nice looking but wholly
inappropriate Thanksgiving turkey scenes of early Americana. Those
were the only trays we could use at the time so we had to figure out
a way to come up with a covering for the turkeys. We could have used
paper or cloth, and in actuality we'd planned to use a bed of greens.

But when shopping for the greens, not a single store had good looking
ones. They were all beyond the "refreshable" stage. So we improvised
on the day of. I had a member of my cooking staff in charge of pasta.
That was his only job. And I set him to figuring out how much we'd need
to cover those darned turkeys. We ended up having far more pasta than
we originally planned to serve in that course, but at least those darned
turkey's stayed hidden. :)

Iasmin

Iasmin de Cordoba, gwalli at ptc.com or iasmin at home.com
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