It's been much too long since I last blogged, and much too long since I did a speech at Toastmasters. So here's me killing two birds with one stone: my second speech in the Toastmasters book, focused on Organization, while also sharing a bit more about me and my family.
Photo (right) shows me on my 21st birthday, where we had 3 birthday cakes. They were all delicious.
Even when my parents lived in a single room in shared apartment, they were hosting big dinner parties for all their friends. They've always loved to host, and I grew up with many dinner parties and brunches and even more dinner parties. The parties were always big, fun ordeals that I never quite saw replicated at my friends' very normal homes. So when I went to college and got my own apartment, and again when I moved back here to my own place in Somerville, I picked up my mom's tradition of playing hostess. My parties are never quite the same big ordeals that my parents plan, but I think I've picked up a thing or two from them over time. And today I want to share with you the 3 steps to hosting a Mirman Family Dinner Party.
The 3 steps cover tips for the 3 stages of hosting a party: planning, hosting, and, of course, analyzing.
I. Planning
You might think the first step, Planning, is simple: you decide what to cook, and you cook it. But when you're planning a Mirman Family Dinner Party, you're hosting a lot of people, and, thus, need a lot of food. A Mirman Family Dinner Party has a minimum of 12 people and can go as high as 50 or 60. So cooking for such a large party requires some real planning. For this my mother has a great tip: put together a cooking schedule.
A cooking schedule maps out the entire week leading up to the event and includes what to buy where and what to cook when. 5 days in advance, it's time to start your grocery shopping. Then each day leading up to the event, it's time to knock off a dish or two that can be prepared in advance and refrigerated. The schedule continues through the day of the event, including hour-by-hour instructions on the day of the dinner party so everything is warm and ready by the time your guests arrive.
The final key as you prepare all of the food for your event, is to make sure you calculate how many guests you'll have and how much food you need. Once you have that in mind, double it. You want both a wide variety and large quantity of food so that your guests don't leave starving.
II. Hosting
Now that you've planned your event and cooked enough food for 2 armies, it's time for step 2: hosting. You may think that there's no tip for actually hosting the event you've so diligently prepared for, but my mother never forgets this key guideline: don't eat, just talk.
You want to enjoy the event and make sure your guests are enjoying themselves too. This means spending time together and making sure your guests are eating the enormous amount of food you've made. To enforce this, you strategically place grandmothers around the table such that one of them is always watching for your plate to be empty. At that time, they immediately ask you what else you want and why you're not eating anything. Meanwhile, you're running around not eating, but instead warming up the next course or talking with your guests.
III. Analyzing
At the end of the night, after all the planning and hosting is behind you, your dinner party duties are not done! It's time for step 3: analyzing. This step is key to making your next event even more successful by doing a post-mortem analysis.
To do this, you pull together your team of dishwashers and servers - in our case, me and my father - and you discuss how the event went. In particular, what food was eaten up? What food was barely touched? How many beets went into that salad and was it too much or too little? You might discover, oh, we don't need that 24th dish, or you may decide, we should have more of the beet salad next time.
The post-mortem tip may seem a bit extreme for the typical dinner party, but I promise you, it's a huge help the next time you're planning such a party. Because then you are armed with proof that you don't need 24 different dishes, or you're reminded, oh, we wanted to take a family photo at this event. The post-mortem is a new step in the Mirman Family Dinner Party process but has become a critical one.
Conclusion
The key to hosting a great Mirman Family Dinner Party is to follow these tips as you plan, host, and analyze your event. As you plan, create a shopping and cooking schedule so you cook more than enough food in time for your event. As you host, make sure your guests never stop eating, while you abstain from doing so yourself. And, finally, as you analyze your event, do a full post-mortem write-up so you can remember what went well and how to improve the parties you host in the future.
In reality, my parents host these big, fun, ordeals because they truly love to spend time with their friends and family. So much so that they could never resist having people over, even if it required hosting the party in shifts or taking the dining room table outside to fit everyone at home. I only hope that their joy of hosting permeates* me as I invite my friends and family for parties at my home.
*"Permeate" was the word of the day for our Toastmasters meeting.
Bonus!
When I initially came up with this topic, I had another tip in mind for the second step, hosting. This tip is in regards to having alcoholic beverages at your event. For a Mirman Family Dinner Party, alchoholic beverages are absolutely acceptable, on one condition: you can only take a drink after making a toast. That is the only restriction, though, and you are encouraged to get creative with your toasts. Typical Mirman Family Dinner Party toasts include toasting to family, or to the birthday boy/girl's spouse or grandchildren, or, one of my favorites, toasting to capitalism (hey, as long as we've got an excuse). Lesson learned: alcoholic beverages are only an excuse to celebrate everything in our lives.
