Home | Login | Recent Changes | Search | All Pages | Help

MenuTrick

There's a saying in the military sciences that amateures talk about firepower while professionals talk about logistics. The idea holds for cooking for groups of people. By and large, in any group of a few or more people, there's enough technique and cool recipes to make many remarkable dishes. The problem is getting it made - logistics. The MenuTrick helps with this.

So, the menu model works like this:

• Look for ingredients that are exceptional, or fresh, or embody some theme. I'm still looking in the Phoenix area - I'm not local.
• Use the same ingredients in multiple dishes. Saves prep time, reduces costs, and actually reduces loss due to variability. People also tend to think this is a nice, subtle chef-touch: Ah, you connected the spinach salad to the lemonade by throwing a little mint in the vinagrett. Brilliant." Yeah, right.
• Organize prep by dish, but buy in terms of re-use. (Obvious, right?)

One way to actually do this is to:

• Kick around some menu items, mainly in terms of the main ingredient.
• Identify the critical important ingredients for each dish.
• Go shopping for those, and get a little extra.
• Organize the ingredients by dish. I like to physically collect ingredients, along with a little card with the "parts" part of the recipe on it. An ongoing professional kitchen doesn't do this, but they know where everything is because they do this all the time, right there.
• Now anyone who's doing cooking or prep can take stuff on pretty conveniently. Take this pile of stuff. Make that out of it. They may not know how all the time, but they always know where they are. And state is obvious? What's the state of the goulash? Well look.
• The dish / ingredient cards are a nice touch when you're serving. Addresses a lot of the allergy problem as well.

This trick is way more useful if you're doing something elaborate. So, it may not even be relevant for AYE Dinner. Except, of cours, the chilis. At the moment we're still back on "What do we want to eat?" We've got chilis & Jack cheese from me, and no cow brains from Becky. Still quite a wide range. It's the South West. Aren't non-brains cow parts big in that region? Do we want to do something with that?

- JimBullock, 2002.10.2

I think we are going to rely on your creative brain, Jim. What sort of menu would you find fun to play with? Maybe if you get us started we can jump in.

- BeckyWinant 10-04-02