With a recent Reddit thread detailing the many different reasons people are dreading Thanksgiving, it's clear that finding ways to de-stress is in order. But no matter how often you cook for yourself or your family, feeding a larger crowd for a holiday meal can make even the most confident of chefs worry. You're not simply scaling up an easy weeknight dinner recipe when it comes to a holiday feast. A large roast plus sides and desserts require time and space, not to mention a bit of patience and grace when things don't go accordingly and you have to improvise.
Take it from a catering chef. Michael Riddell, executive chef of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, routinely cooks dinner for thousands of guests at a time. (Suddenly your 20-person affair doesn't seem so daunting.) "When you're cooking for 20 people, it seems like it's not a huge number, but when you're actually doing it, it's a lot of effort," says Riddell. Here, he talks us through a number of tips and tricks to maintain your sanity when it comes to feeding a crowd.
1. Going for broke
No need to reinvent the wheel. Crowd-pleasing mashed potatoes are inexpensive and easy to make in large batches. Sheri L. Gibbin/Getty Images
Start by taking it down a notch. (If you've already bristled at this suggestion, we're speaking to you specifically.) One of the common pitfalls that home cooks can make when it comes to big holiday dinners is to be overly ambitious. While elements of the cooking process may be the same whether you're cooking for two or 20, "when you're doing large scale, you shouldn't do those intricate dishes that have multiple components," says Riddell.
Save that ambition for a more intimate dinner party where you can be creative, and stick with what you know for the holidays. "It's the creativity versus the tradition," says Riddell. "I'll come to my wife on holidays with some crazy ideas, taking some dishes from the southwest or the East Coast and trying to put them into California cuisine, and she's like, 'No, don't do that.'"
A useful tip within a tip: if you're trying to be the only cook in the kitchen for a big holiday dinner, maybe run your plan by someone who knows how to talk you down a bit.
"Stick to what you know," says Riddell, and maybe bring your creative spark to one or two dishes rather than the entire spread. This is also your permission to look at the list of what you're planning to make, and go ahead and cross one of those dishes off the list right now. Unless it's a beloved family tradition, nobody will know it was missing.
2. Not doing food math
There's a big space between not enough food and completely overdoing it. CNET
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