Starting preparations for a joint party with a friend. We have birthdays around the same time, and we have seized on the idea of soup and bagels to feed the multitudes.
Jesus had loaves and fishes. We will hopefully have some loaves too, although the fishes have regretfully been left out (smells) in favour of large quantities of carrots.
I like a spot of bulk catering, but I’ve not made soup for 25 before. I’m quite looking forward to the challenge, which is really only making double a normal quantity, times three pots of soup. I can make use of my enormous ladle (a wedding present which doesn’t get much use for quantities under 6 people), large cooking pots, etc.
We are probably feeding 30 at the cake stage, but as both of us are making cake, that’s only 15 each.
3 cakes a-piece should do the trick. Mine all seem to be fruit related, but it’s also a case of seeing what I want to use up. Time to defrost the overripe bananas in the freezer which are kept for such purposes (a helpful tip from a former flatmate).
The last time we did one of these joint parties, Dan and I were still living in Inverleith. A very large sitting room made parties fun. Now we have more, but smaller, rooms, so a bit of ingenuity is required. Hopefully the kids coming will agree to play in one room, and we’ll keep the soup etc in the other. It may be just as well we don’t like our sitting room carpet that much…
In these days of ever more scrutiny of diets, ever more opportunities to point the finger at us as consumers – and over-consumers – bread and soup strikes a fairly quiet note, I feel.
Cake doesn’t really get excused…but then I am a firm believer that cake should be encouraged. Not daily, true, but it is a sure-fire way of filling up lots of people.
And I learned that lesson as a student. Should you want to feed the multitudes, trying to feed 3 guys, one of whom was running triathlons at the time, and a girl with a ‘healthy appetite’, is no bad place to start.
I’ll give you the line-up of cakes on another occasion.
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