Now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve invited actual people to your actual house for an actual meal with actual food.
Sure, you can pick up a fast-food bucket of fried chicken, sprinkle it lightly all over with paprika, put them on a wire rack above a baking sheet, stick it in a 200′ oven and hide the trash as though your life depended on it and have the main course covered. (WHO WOULD DO SUCH A THING?!) Make your own coleslaw yesterday (bag o’ premade slaw + ranch dressing, friend) and you’re pretty much morally obligated to say you home-made the whole spread, is my philosophy.
Sure, you can set out goat cheese, sliced chives, and rounds of toast and call it a day for the appetizers. Employing a strong hand with the gin will ensure the evening is remembered in a haze which could very well be misconstrued as delicious.
When you are running low on time, you never, ever attempt to make something from scratch, of course, because that is invariably the moment that everything will stick or burn or congeal or fail to congeal.
No!
You pick up something that is already warm- a pizza, a bucket of fried chicken, two rotisserie chickens from the deli department, in their little sacks- and you employ shocking behavior to hide their base origins. You put them on your own baking sheets, pans, racks, whatever they would normally be on had you cooked them yourself, and bung them into a warm oven to be brought out and exclaimed over.
(Rotisserie chickens are particularly useful in this regard, as you can stick two of them on one V-roasting tray, slice up some lemons to scatter in or on them, shove thyme or rosemary or something up their little butts and cover with freshly ground pepper before slamming into the oven at 200′ 10 minutes before your guests show up.)
All that is well and good, and practicing sleight-of-hand with takeaway trash will serve you in good stead when time becomes An Issue. One thing it can sometimes be hard to fake, though, is a decent dessert.
Putting a small amount of effort into your dessert can very well trick people into thinking you’ve knocked yourself out on their behalf when in fact you have spent approximately three minutes catering to their well-being.
This little collection, stolen shamelessly from a large number of places, will not fail, will taste good, and will look ten times more clever than they, in fact, are.
Onward!
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The Mincemeat Situation
(which you call a ‘Brandied Compote’ to your guests)
1 jar of Mincemeat, which is found near the baking goods/chocolate chips/dried coconut area of your friendly local grocer. It may be labeled ‘Nonesuch’; I’m not at liberty to say why- 1 bottle of Brandy (at least a step above the very cheapest thing you can find, natch)
- 1-2 pints of the very best vanilla ice cream you can afford
Don’t be alarmed about the mincemeat. It’s really just dried fruits and nuts chopped fine, sweetened, and cooked down a bit. You can make a pie out of it with the leftovers in the jar if you feel frugal, or you can just throw the half-full thing away after the party.
Stir 2 tablespoons of brandy into 1/2 cup of mincemeat and microwave in 20 second increments, stirring and tasting betweentimes until it’s warmed through but not scalding.
Put one dainty scoop of ice cream into one dainty little dish, top with two spoonfuls of the mincemeat business, and serve immediately before it melts all to hell.
It has the benefit of tasting a little exotic and grown-up while simultaneously being just ice cream, which nearly everyone likes.
And on the plus side you can pick up the brandy when you’re getting your guest wine, or gin, depending on how much artificially generated goodwill your feast is going to require.
The Strawberry and Cream Cheese Situation
(Government name: ‘Fresh Strawberries with Vanilla Cream’)
As big a container of strawberries as you can find, rinsed and patted dry but not cut up in any way
1 block of cream cheese
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
1/8 teaspoon Vanilla extract
3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream
Put the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla into the bowl of your electric mixer and beat until smooth and well combined. Add the whipping cream and beat for a few minutes longer until the mixture is a loose dip consistency (add more whipping cream if you want it still looser). Parcel out the strawberries onto plates and give everyone their own little container of dip.
Note, if you will, the impressive simplicity of this arrangement!
Why would you spend your time cutting the tops off of those strawberries, or- heaven forfend!- cutting them into quarters? No, no, a thousand times, no! Strawberries look quite charming as-is, and piled on a small dessert plate next to a stylish little bowl of dip, each person can do the work themselves.
Lovely.
If you feel you really must cut up those strawberries or have no charming dip bowls, quarter the berries and layer them with the cream cheese into tall glasses as a parfait. As Donkey says, ain’t nobody don’t like a parfait.
The Chocolate Cake Situation
(aka ‘Chocolate Hazelnut Sandwiches’)
You can buy a decent chocolate cake almost anywhere, so this is only to be used if it’s important you look like a good cook and not a cake-buying cheater. You will, of course, still be a cake-buying cheater, but you won’t look like one. Essential distinction.
- 1 plain pound cake (fresh from the bakery section, not frozen)
- 1 jar of Nutella
- 1 can of squirt cream- real cream if you please, not that awful, awful fake-o junk
- 1 small package of any berry that suits you
- 2-3 tablespoons of powdered sugar
This is what you do:
You take that pound cake and you slice it in half from pole to pole, so that you end up with the top crust half and the bottom crust half.
Heat that Nutella in a microwave-safe bowl for, say, ten seconds. Stir it a bit and give it another 5 seconds until it’s really quite drippy and pourable.
Pour your Nutella all over the bottom half of the pound cake, using a knife to smear it to the edges. Try not to trickle too much over the side, but don’t lose sleep over it if you do. If you have flashbacks to every PB&J you’ve ever made, you’re doing it right.
Set the top of the poundcake back onto the bottom half. Slice that sucker into thin-ish little fingers.
Set one or two fingers on a darling little desert plate. Squeeze out a swirl of whipped cream. Set three berries cunningly against the whole mess. Dust the whole plate with powdered sugar (yes, right up to the edges. Do this in the sink, obviously). Stick a tiny leaf of mint in the whipped cream business if you feel particularly fancy.
Serve it forth with a palpable air of smugness.
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With any luck, your excellent desert-making skills will get you invited over to someone else’s house every now and then, where you will not be required to pretend to cook, will not have to wash the dishes, and can graciously pretend not to notice the takeaway containers peeking out of the trash bin.
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