Hi everyone. Marty Richardson here. Today I want to discuss guidelines for creating a dinner menu.

What’s Too Much Food?

The first thing I want you to consider is the cumulative effect of all the food you are serving your guests. You are starting with appetizers, then on to the main course, starch, vegetable, bread and dessert…that’s a lot of food. And how often is it when you are sitting at dinner, and the dessert tray comes up and your eyes say “Yes!” and your stomach says, “There’s just no way”.

It’s About Timing

What happens is that it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that you are full. So during happy hour, you are serving a lot of appetizers, when you get to the main course, your 20 minutes is up. Your stomach is saying, “That’s enough”. Dessert rolls out and you don’t have room! Well you are spending most of your time, money, and effort on your main course and dessert at most dinner parties. You want to make sure people are going to get to taste the main event.

Portion Control

So keep your appetizers light and small. I really think that appetizers are only there to give the early arrivals something to do while we wait for the other guests to arrive.

Light Starch Please

The next thing I want to discuss is you want to limit the number of starches per course. Starches loosely being described as bread, it could be grains, it could be pastas or rice, or whatever. You want to keep that to a minimum so that people can get to the main course and dessert before filling up.

Looks Good And Good For You Too

You want to also think about your ingredients in terms of nutritional value and aesthetic value. Now what does that mean? It means bulk up on vegetables. If you buy a lot of vegetables it is going to keep the budget for your party low. It’s going to provide the most color for each course. Vegetables are going to provide the greatest amount of texture on the plate, whether they are raw or cooked. Vegetables can be used as garnishes. Vegetables can be used as receptacles like for garnishes or dips. You can hollow out a red pepper and put dip in there. They are also less filling. So there are a lot of reasons why you should serve a whole lot of vegetables at your dinner party. You give people a lot of things to try. And it is not going to cost you a lot of money to do that.

More Tips

So come back tomorrow. We are going to have more tips on creating a dinner menu. This is probably going to take me a few days before we get through this topic. And then I will probably still think of more tips after that!

Welcome to the holidays!