organizing a great meal

Riti had come over with her daughter to spend the afternoon with me. I made a Thai green curry (with chicken and green beans), Garlic prawns (nice plump juicy A grade jumbo prawns stir fried with some ginger, garlic, sweet chilli sauce and hoisin sauce) and some stir fried chinese greens ( spinach stir fried with oyster sauce, garlic , garnished with roasted sesame oil and sesame seeds). And we had a dessert platter . Riti was impressed with the spread.
It works very well for us. People are impressed with the oriental or continental food we serve and we are saved the hassle of cooking Indian food (from which ever part of India) which has never been my forte.
A and I have been married for 6 years now and we learned a few lessons when we got into our act of organising our kitchen.
1.You can never cook oriental food once a month or once in two months. Well you can, but it is a huge hassle. Organising ingredients for a foreign cuisine for one day just does'nt make sense. A and I being the gourmands that we are, would never be happy with substitutes.
2. Never try out dishes for the first time on the day that you are entertaining. If we want to try a new recipe on the dday, we always do a trial a day before. So on the dday we have a nicely balanced dish and no surprizes of the unpleasant kind.
3. While entertaining to impress.. never do a cuisine you are not familiar with. A no brainer, right? you'll be surprized to see how many people just don't do this.
4. If you are cooking for a large number of people, try and have dishes cooked in different ways for eg, one bake, one steamed, one fried etc so that your stove, microwave oven or grill does'nt have a line to dishes to be finished.
5. For lunches, it is quiet acceptable to have just one or two kinds of drinks for everybody. Eg, you can have beers and sangria for everyone or like I did today.. the cocktail for the day was chilli vodka. This way you will not have to organize a bunch of mixers or glasses in addition to your food.
6. Organize a simple one dish meal for the kids. Choose something popular like pasta or noodles or parathas followed by dessert. They are usually more bothered about having fun with the others.
7. Kids below 3-4 years should be fed before being taken to parties. They can nibble on some junk being passed around and both the parents and the child are happy.
Oh!, I can write a book on this.. but as better sense prevails, I'd rather not. At least not right now.