BootsnAll Travel Network



Borth 2008

It was the party of the decade, if not the century!

Aberjazz filling up the Dancefloor

Have a look at the menu and laugh (or weep):

  • 13:30 Soup Lunch & Fresh Rolls: Welsh Cawl, Potato & Leek (V)
    —50 portions @ 250ml

  • 16:00 (pre-rugby) Early Supper: Baked potatoes, chilli, vegetarian lasagne, salad
    —30/15 portions resp.

  • 18:00 Cocktails & Canapés: parmesan tuiles, lapsang souchong-marbled quails eggs, savoury choux balls, rice paper rolls, Thai fishcakes/sausage rolls
    —yes, they were all on the list. I was hoping for three of them to come off. Some did, but not the ones mentioned here.

  • 19:30 Sandwiches: egg mayo, tuna& sweetcorn, cheese & coleslaw/salad, ham & salad
    —20 medium-sliced loaves, mainly for the 50 members of the choir. Next time I’ll ask for thickly sliced!

  • 19:00-onwards Finger Party Food: Tricolore crustades, mini samosas, Thai sausage rolls with soy & ginger dip, savoury palmiers, puff pastry pouches, devilled eggs, crudités with blue cheese dip baba ganoush and white bean dip, mini baked potatoes, roast vegetable skewers, köfte meatballs with hummous dip, falafel-pita bites with hummous & tzaziki, tortilla bites with mango salsa and soured cream, guacamole, pumpernickel/blini/bread bites with tapenade, mackerel pâté, smoked salmon, prawns etc., stuffed cherry tomatoes and cucumber cups with herby cream cheese, cheese board
    —Most of this got made, but not the way I intended it. For example, did you know that 750g potato curry makes enough filling for 100 samosas, but a pack of Filo pastry has only 6 sheets in it?

It was five o’ clock on the day of the event before I started on the party food prep—at about the time when the chef who was helping said that we should start plating up. So none of the canapés turned out quite as intended. But what is most amazing is that only nine of the 50-odd proposed menu items didn’t get made in the end. No, really.

Long entry warning (2,500 words)

The final list of ingredients and spices comprised 135 different kinds. And yet I thought I could do it all on my own.

Here’s the deal: I’ve worked in restaurant kitchens, a banqueting suite and sandwich bars. I have a vague notion of what is involved. My list of dishes wasn’t unrealistic—for a brigade.

My time table was pretty much like the ones we were presented with when catering for a function at the hotel where I used to work. Only there’d be a group of people and the head chef would delegate tasks according to each member’s strengths. One chef would be on general prep and hot food (the lunch and early evening meal, perhaps the potato curry, falafel and köfte). One would be on sandwiches and parts of the prep which can be combined with that (e.g. eggs, salad garnish etc.) another would be on pastry, quiches, rolls etc. and perhaps yet another on dips and canapés (and that person would have found use for the skinned tomato slices which I reflexively prepared for concasse garnish).

And of course there’d be a kitchen porter who would help with clearing away pots and pans and other utensils. When these things start piling up you know that everything is turning to shit. Well, in fact there was such a person: my poor, long-suffering hubby.
John

I started prep about 4 hours late on the day before the party. I was late because we spent the morning rushing around in a frenzy, collecting last-minute purchases, most of which I wouldn’t get a chance to use. But did you know that chillies are hard to find in Wales? John returned much later that afternoon with a small handful of fresh green chillies and a pack of dried birdseye chillies which I used in abundance because I figured the wilted-looking things didn’t pack much heat (the opposite is true–but that’s another story).

Add to this the effort required to organise all the ingredients and paraphenalia, getting a feel for a new kitchen and having to shake off well-meaning amateurs who kept coming in (without losing my rag, but that didn’t last!) and you can picture the frame of mind I was in when I looked at the list of things to do and realised that I was all alone.

But John came back. He was late because he had cooked lunch for my sister’s houseguests, but he dressed up in apron and cap like a trooper and set to work.

I forgot that this was his first time in a propper kitchen. I shouted abuse at him and, according to him, threatened to divorce him three times over the course of the afternoon. But he stuck with it, as did my sister’s best friend who came to help on the second day, working the sandwich station like a horse despite the avoidable obstacles I presented her with, in the shape of squashed bread and hard-ish butter.

Can you believe that there wasn’t any time to transfer the butter into a tub and stick it on a board in the hot cupboard for a few minutes? No, me neither. I didn’t even register it, let alone find her a decent butter knife and show her how to quickly spread sandwich fillings with the back of a spoon. And as for the bread… Morrison’s does the best bread of any UK supermarket, by some distance, but fresh loaves get squashed during cutting. The resulting sandwiches were almost impossible to plate, and the whole operation took at least twice as long as it should.

So, what else went wrong?

It takes a lot longer to do the prep than the actual cooking. This isn’t news to me, but it still felt as if nothing had been accomplished as the event drew nearer. Items that were near the top of the list kept getting relegated since I had to focus on pre-cooking the hot dishes so that they could be cooled down on time. At the end of the first day, I sat on a big pot of very hot chilli and 15 portions of vegetarian lasagne, but nothing else (although the prep fridge was full of sandwich fillings, roasted veg and the like, the chickpeas were soaking, the pastry had been taken out, there were thai sausage mix and defrosting lamb chops in the meat fridge, and John had made a fantastic köfte mix).

In short, it felt as if I had only just started when the kitchen had less than one hour to go until closing time at eleven.

Then I remembered that I had forgotten the bread dough (prepping it the night before saves at least one rising step).

I was rushed. I had problems settling on one of two competing recipes, problems dealing with the American volume measurements and I didn’t take the time to read the instructions carefully. Consequently, I tipped all of the flour into the dough mixer instead of half, causing it to emit a crunching grind. In panic, I sloshed in more water, followed by more flour after which it promptly happened again, and then screeched at John to bloody well sort it out.

John had never baked bread before.

Long story short, we rescued the dough after finishing the general clean up. It had the consistency of spongy wallpaper paste, but I decided to keep it. It could always be sorted in the morning and I frankly didn’t have the energy to start another batch in my sister’s breadmachine (which would have been an all-night job, considering that we needed fifty rolls).

My sister was still up by the time we staggered back into the house. “Oh,” she said, “Didn’t I tell you? Phil and Rhona have agreed to help. They’re both chefs!”

(I know. Grrrr.)

So I started Party Day with sore muscles but no panic, aside from a moment of embarrassment when Phil came to see what he could cook off in the B&B, in addition to the quiche and filo parcels he’d already done, before finishing with his guests and relocating to the kitchen.

He took the bread dough with a shrug.”When you need these by?” and followed my surprised look with, “my first job was a baker.”

It was just as good to start the day reasonably calmly. Six kilograms of sweaty leeks and five kilograms of still part-frozen lamb chops is a lot to get through, particularly when you have to de-bone the chops and then clean up the stock for twenty litres of Welsh Cawl.

Amazingly, the lunch prep worked out fine. I was even able to bring the service forward half-an-hour from the original two o’clock. Phil appeared well in time with 50 perfectly formed, freshly baked dinner rolls and wasted no time in getting to work.

The second moment of embarrassment came when I showed him my list, but to his credit he didn’t burst out laughing.
Phil in the Kitchen
While Phil beavered away with the speed of the real professional, offering up more moments of embarrassment when he presented me with food to taste that he knew much better how to judge than I ever could hope to, Rhona kept the front-of-house running like clockwork, organising the incoming food (ours and the guests’), people and dishes and delegating the right helpers to kitchen duties so that we ended up with knowledgeable people who could take the heat of last-minute prep and service. John was a transformed man, rightfully pleased with his köfte and falafel, volunteering to run the fry station and quietly cleaning stuff out of the way in the meantime. He could find gainful employment in any restaurant now.

And I? I was clueless, faffing between different jobs and loosing it big time.

The early supper for the expected 40-odd arrivals was brought forward to four because of the rugby match, but somebody neglected to tell people so that the food was left in the hot cupboard (I did not succeed in getting the damn thing transferred to the self catering kitchen for somebody else to take charge—where were all the people who had so eagerly offered to help?). That meant that at four o’clock all the cantine-style catering was done (with the exception of the sandwiches), and we could regroup.

I was just about to start on the pastry when Phil said it was time to stop for plating up. It was five. Where had the time gone?

The cocktail reception was at six, but while the lasagne and chilli remained untouched in the hot cupboard (aside from a few special orders for chilli jacked potatoes, which we had a hard time serving—where were the people that could have manned the self-catering kitchen and fed the newcomers?), not a single one of the canapés was ready. Not one.

Thankfully, I remembered the teacakes.
Green Tea Shortbread and Brownies

And suddenly the panic was over. I had already started to assemble the samosas (which was easier than I thought, although I overfilled them. I had never made samosas before) and was on a roll.

You know how thin filo pastry is? It’s just a fraction of a millimetre thick. A 250g packet must contain dozens of sheets, and each would make 3 miniature samosas.

Only it doesn’t. It contains six sheets and a lot of dusting flour (in all fairness, the flour is needed) and it’s been a long time since I’d last worked with filo pastry.

18 mis-shapen samosas later I stuttered to a renewed halt, wondering what to do next—the sausage rolls still didn’t have any dipping sauce and I couldn’t start on the fish cakes because the cooker was piled high with baking trays (remember what I said about piling up trays and pans?)—when a smell alerted me to something in the oven. Probably bits of filo that had broken off the samosas.

I left it at that and got busy on the next task.

“Do you still have something in the oven?” John asked five minutes later.

“Nah.” The samosas had all gone, which left…only the palmiers!

They didn’t look too burnt. A bit over-browned perhaps, but who’d notice in the dim light? In fact, they looked surprisingly even.

That was because there was no parmesan in my parmesan and mushroom duxelle palmiers. For a moment I was tempted to send them out anyway. People were clamouring for food. But Rhona had started to dish up the pre-prepared items and fewer were sticking their nose through the kitchen doors. Furious at my stupidity, I binned the whole tray and started again.

The lasagne and chilli were still sitting in the hot cupboard, gnawing at the back of my mind—as if I had nothing better to worry about. The damn canteen food had eaten up the lion’s share of yesterday’s precious time in the kitchen, and now it was slowly spoiling.

Phil, meanwhile, started plating up. There had been no time (ha!) to go through the list (which was now scattered across various parts of the kitchen in the form of loose leaves), so he pulled up random boxes from the prep fridge and created little works of art on crackers and baguette croustades.

I, meanwhile, was losing the will to live. Standing up for so many hours hurts. It hurt John even more (’cause he is taller), but unlike me he didn’t complain. I flounced out of the kitchen for a smoke.

But then the others had all taken small breaks. When I came back twenty minutes later, I was surprised at how much better I felt. My sister’s best friend said, “If you don’t take any breaks, it’s like buying cheap paper—” she pointed at the sheets of coarse greaseproof paper to which my parmesan tuilles were irreversibly welded and the thin clingfilm that had fallen out of its box, along with the cutter “—it doesn’t pay off in the end.”

No, being over-ambitious doesn’t pay off. But we pulled it off all the same, thanks to a great team effort. Now when I remember the kitchen, I see it full of people focussed on producing a continuous supply of delicious food. The sandwiches, cold canapés, fish cakes and sausage rolls (with their respective dipping sauces), palmiers, falafel bites, Lapsang Souchong-marbled eggs, roasted vegetable skewers and whatever else—it just kept on coming.

The lasagne disappeared when the choir got wind of it. It turns out that most of them are vegetarian. The chilli had just developed the right flavour—for our taste. It required Phil’s skilled hands to mellow it for lunch on the next day.

And then it was all done. Somehow the trays, pots and pans were cleared away, the rubbish emptied, the surfaces wiped, the oven cleaned and the floor mopped, until the kitchen looked as if nobody had been in there all day.

And then we joined the party.

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One Response to “Borth 2008”

  1. Clarine Duroseau Says:

    I wanted to thank you for this great read. I absolutely enjoyed every little part of it. I have you bookmarked and will be checking back.