Menu Ideas for Entertaining

To help you plan and throw a successful holiday dinner party, work out your menu ideas for entertaining ahead of time.

The most successful parties all have one thing in common: careful planning. When working out your menu ideas for entertaining, the first thing you should do is sit down with a pen and paper and write down all your ideas for the dinner. Some things to consider might be:

• Will you serve your guests appetizers at the table or as a more relaxed pre-dinner snack that they can help themselves to like a buffet?
• Will there be a food or ingredient that is used in all the dishes you serve?
• How many courses are you planning to serve?
• Do any of your guests have special dietary needs?
• Is this a sit down dinner party or a stand and mingle party?

The best way to approach a party menu is one step at a time. When getting your menu ideas for entertaining together, it is helpful to break everything down to foods that can be made beforehand, at best two or three days ahead of time. Think of serving something that can be served cold like truffles or Macaroons for dessert. These can be made a day or two ahead of time and then you can focus on the rest of the cooking. Otherwise, if you want to serve a warm dessert, think of something that can be prepared first then warmed and assembled the day of the party.

Another good idea is to set up the appetizers ahead of time and hold them in your fridge. Canapés, if they are meant to be served cold, can just be covered and stored in the refrigerator. You can serve them directly from the refrigerator as your guests arrive. Otherwise, you can put the canapés together and have them ready for the oven. Then as your guests arrive, you can pop the canapés into the oven already assembled.

Just like the appetizers and desserts, the side dishes can be pre-made and held in the refrigerator to be finished at dinnertime. In fact, many side dishes benefit from resting overnight or even a day or two. Roasted vegetable dishes like a mushroom Au Gratin can be cooked two or three days beforehand and heated for 20 minutes before serving. One day before your dinner, you could take a sweet potato puff recipe and pipe it into a tray of mini muffin tins. Covered with plastic wrap and stored in the refrigerator, they can be baked at the same time as the other sides.

Now we have the appetizers, sides, and desserts prepared and ready to cook or, even better, ready to serve. At this point, we need to get the entrée ready. If you have gotten your ingredients together already, then you can focus on getting your soup and main dish going and spend more time with your guests than with your pots and pans.

Considering that every component of your dinner is ready to go, you have the whole day of the dinner to either prepare a complicated dish like lasagna, which can also be made a day or so ahead of time, or use this time to get your house ready for guests. There is almost always something you will have forgotten that will need more time, so give yourself some breathing room on the day of your party. Getting your salad together that day is best because it will wilt otherwise.

Since you have assembled all your food already, you can make your own salad dressing, get your soup going, or even a little cold aperitif. Getting some cocktails ready for your guests ahead of time would be a great idea as well.

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