Party food for 50 - no sweat

Our man in the kitchen, Jack Shamash, puts his feet up two hours before the crowd turns up

When it comes to cooking for parties I just tell my wife to get out of the kitchen. On my own, I can rustle up a fantastic meal for 50 people and barely break sweat.

 

There are three rules I stick to:

1) Keep party food simple. That means forgetting hot food (a crowd won't all arrive at the same time, so ‘hot' is too tricky. Forget spicy food too - half the guests won't like it. And don't bother doing anything classy - it's not worth the effort.

 

2) Have a vegetarian and vegan alternative - it's impolite not to.

 

3) Cheat at anytime you can get away with.  

 

Here's how to go about it in 8 easy steps:

* Buy six good quality chickens. This is about as many as you can fit into a standard domestic oven - if they're large chickens you might have to cook them in two batches. Roast them and leave them to cool in a cool place.

 

* Buy a good sized salmon - about five or six pounds - cleaned and gutted. Put it in a big fish kettle. If you don't have one, you can usually borrow one from the supermarket (Morrisons asks for a £10 deposit). Cover it with water and plenty of salt (four level teaspoons for every pint of water), some pepper and a bay leaf or two. Bring to the boil. Simmer very gently for about a quarter of an hour and then leave the fish in the hot water for about another half hour. By this time it should be cooked through. Just poke a knife into the fish to make sure it is.

 

* Take four large tea trays, cover them in silver foil. Finely shred a couple of iceberg lettuces and spread evenly over the trays.

 

* Scrape the top layer of skin off the salmon and pop the whole fish onto one of the lettuce-covered trays. Finely slice some cucumber and lay the slices along the length of the salmon. Put some lemon wedges along the bottom. That's one dish ready for the table.

 

* The other trays are for the chicken. I get ten pieces out of each bird. I split each chicken in two, remove the wings and joint the legs. I take the breast off the bone and cut each one in two. I place the pieces neatly on the lettuce trays.

 

* The vegetarians get a nice lump of cheese and plenty of French bread. And I usually go to my local Turkish bakery and buy those lovely hot slices of pastry covered in spinach.

 

* The crowd gets two big salads: apple, celery and walnut with a sweet dressing of oil, sugar and lemon juice. And cous cous with tomato and cucumber and a vinaigrette dressing. Buy baby plum or cherry tomatoes: they don't have to be cut up.

 

* Dessert is a tray of baclava from the Turkish bakery and a bowl of chopped fruit, a big jug of cream and some posh wafer biscuits from the Italian deli.

 

If I roast all the chicken in one batch, and start preparing the food by 3pm, I can get it all beautifully laid out by 6pm; then I can have a bath and watch telly and wait until the first guests come at around 8pm. Oops, nearly forgot the mayonnaise - put a couple of pots of it around the salmon trays. Sorted.

 

JACK SHAMASH puts meals on the family table every night of the week at his home in north London. He also writes for The Times, The Guardian and Horticulture Week (so he knows a lot about fruit and veg)