Purchasing Food For A Party

2026-01-04

We hosted a few parties during this holiday season, it is really nice that people come to our house and fill our house with warmth. But part of the duties we have is to coordinate the food. Sneha does a great job, she will have a text thread or an excel sheet, she does a much better job than I do. We also play games, deal with children, and have conversations, but the most important part of a party is food for us.

I think if we were to always try to have the right amount of food we would have the same likely hood of having too much food and too less food, trying to hit on the right amount. I imagine it like a bell curve ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution ) that is centered around having just the right amount of food. If we have 10 people coming we would try to have about 10x the amount that a normal person eats for a meal. And when everyone leave we would have almost no food left, or people would leave just a little hungry.

But I think both Sneha and I have a social stigma around running out of food, we would be embarrassed if we hosted a party and ran out of food. So we definitely would rather have more food than less food, and this shifts the bell curve over to the right by a standard deviation or so, and hopefully at our parties it is extremely rare to run out of food. We did order some emergency pizza at a family party we were throwing because we were both afraid we were running out of food, I do think we made the right move in this case. This works great for parties and people are mostly happy and we aren’t embarrassed, but we are often stuck with leftovers.

So this becomes a new problem, how do we optimize leftovers. I think we are still trying to figure it out the best way to do this, but my first realization is that we need to be pushy with leftovers. I use the word ‘pushy’ bluntly, the more we can distribute the food the better chance we have of it actually being eaten vs being thrown away. It is easier if ever person at the party takes some one slice of pizza versus us being stuck with two pizzas.

I think the second thing we can do it to buy ingredients or meals that would go well into become other dishes. Things like steak or chicken breast can be reused in salad or curry or what not, but other dishes like fried chicken are a little harder to preserve and reheat. Oddly things that are really fresh, salads, fried food, cut fruit, seafood, need to be eaten quick and can make for tough leftovers while things that are preserved, chips, dried meat, cheese, has a better chance of being eaten over the long run.

We still need to get better at optimizing food that is leftover from a party but I have accepted that we will always have leftovers, we are not the couple that will run out of food.

-Gary