The past three years, my girlfriend and I have hosted an annual holiday party at our apartment for about 30-40 people. This party is pretty much the one big social event that we host a year. We have people over for dinner throughout the year, and I host poker games every so often. However there’s a big difference between cooking for 6 versus 40.

Last year was culinary extravaganza.  I made food ranging from fresh spring rolls to empanadas. We even had a Turducken.  The food turned out only OK. It’s extremely difficult to both set a menu that’s appropriate for a wide range of people, and to prepare it in a manner so it’s warm when it should be and cold when it needs to be.  More importantly, it was bone tiring.  We were preparing the night before. We were prepping the morning of.  We were still cooking when guests arrived. I ended up serving the cold food warm, and the warm food cold.

This year we decided to do something different.  We had half of the food catered. Catering may not be right word.  We didn’t have waiters and waitresses in white shirts serving hor’dourves.  We had big tins of pasta, salad, and eggplant from our favorite local whole in the wall pasta place, Basta Pasta.  The catering was $200 for pasta, salad, and a eggplant parmigiana like appetizer. I was taken aback originally by the cost of the catering, but in the end I relented.  I wanted it easy.

All said and done the cost of the holiday party this year was about the same as what it cost last year.  While the ingredients for the catered food would’ve run only about $70 at most, catering was still a good deal.  Part of this is a result of my own predilections . I prefer cooking many different dishes rather than a big batch of something.  Partially it’s just not very easy cooking pasta for 40 at home.   Had I opted to make pasta, I would’ve made pasta for 10 and paella for another 10 or something like that.  Cooking different dishes is almost always more expensive.  Ingredients are not used as efficiently. More importantly, having half the food catered was a real time saver.  I was actually able to interact my guests before 9pm, and even managed to shower before they arrived which they were greatly thankful of.