Menu dilemma

[lola]

My husband's old buddy, brother, niece and their spouses are coming over Sunday. Chinese New Year, and just before Mardi Gras. Nine at the table.

This guests range from late 20's foodies to late 40's wine-cellar-owning foodies to meat-and-potatoes types.

The niece said she'd go as far as eating "fish and free-range chicken." (forsooth) Another guest, when my husband asked about dietary restrictions, is said not to like curry. (ok, fine.)

I like or love all these people, even the intimidating high-standards one, don't see any of them more than once a year if that, am willing to make an effort.

Options:
chicken gumbo or some sort of étouffée, rice, cornbread, crusty bread salad. Dessert maybe along Frenchy chocolate lines.
or
Tom Yum style soup
shrimp/vegetable stir fry Chinese style
purchased egg rolls

How obligated am I to provide actual free range chicken? Is shrimp environmentally unsound? What are the ethics here? I start to understand why the dinner party is becoming passé.

Recipe suggestions?

[lola]

Oh, yes. Another ethics one:

May I use the chicken carcass I have to make stock, without admitting its probably caged origins?

[Deleted]

When faced with large groups, I go with "fusion buffet" -- 8 to 10 different ethnic or local items so that everybody can choose what they like. Naturally, for any normal person with a normal kitchen, this requires finding at least 5 items that can be prepared in advance so that the stove/oven/microwave are not overburdened when it is showtime.

[lola]

Hmm. Yes. Like in this case Chinese New Dimanche Gras. I like that.

[Deleted]

Absolutely.

[lola]

Back to the ethics.

In my early 20's food faddist era, I was guilty of telling an aunt by marriage that I could not eat her lasagna because the cheese had rennet. I didn't want her to make me anything special; salad and bread would have been fine. Looking back, I'd have been just fine if she had fibbed, would've loved her authentic Italian dish, since I wasn't allergic or anything.

This is a parallel case, I think. Must I use only free range chicken for soup soup stock because our niece specified it? And furthermore: Should I apologize to that aunt while I still have the chance?

[Deleted]

Lie to the niece if necessary. Tell her that the chicken was so free range that you had to chase it across three counties before personally wringing its neck. Ask the niece to do the honors next time to ensure total authenticity.

Alternate plan: tell the niece to sit in a corner and go hungry while the others eat.

Feel free to tell the aunt that you have evolved over the years. Don't make a point of it, but do not hesitate to tell her that when one is young, one sometimes has strange extremist views. Especially tell her this if the niece is within earshot.

[lagatta]

Gung Haggis Fat Choy is a similar, and very popular event in Vancouver, combining the Lunar New Year and the Scottish Robbie Burns night banquets: www.gunghaggis.com This popular event has spread to the nearby city Seattle.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Haggis_Fat_Choy (The wiki articles has been criticised as too promotional, but the event is scarcely controversial - it only involves people of different backgrounds having fun together).

Lola, if you really want to be honest, just make sure there are some vegetarian dishes your niece can eat. She'll probably give in to the other treats.

[lola]

Ha, K!

Fun, lagatta. Gung Haggis Fat Choy. Maybe I work that in somehow.

I'm afraid honesty isn't necessarily my main objective here. Though I do value it normally.

[lagatta]

I know it isn't the main objective - but not having a fuss or fight is. It was just a suggestion.

[lola]

Oh, for sure. I appreciate it.

I wouldn't dream of slipping meat into what I offered as a vegetarian dish, for instance. Or if it were a religious thing.

[lola]

So I am going to adjust my attitude a little, make another main dish vegetarian, and not address how the fowl in the tom yum stock spent its brief life. Thank you, lagatta and kerouac, for helping me sort that out.

Families can be tricky.

I had hoped to make this a simpler menu because I tend to get too carried away in the planning stage and end up tossing too many balls in the air.

[Deleted]

Not that you would do that, but most vegetarians I know have been happy to just eat potatoes when there is nothing else suitable for them.

[lagatta]

Lola, I don't know what is readily available where you live, but I can buy (frozen) Chinese dumplings filled with either meat, poultry or tofu/some other vegetarian protein, and vegetables: cabbage, leek, mushroom etc. There isn't much difference in taste between the veg and meat ones - the seafood ones are a treat. Those can be boiled, steamed or sautéed, and are served with some kind of sauce (hot sauce, peanut sauce etc). That is one dish that most everyone likes - and dumplings are traditional for the New Year - and that takes almost no prep.

[Deleted]

I buy those frozen dumplings often -- I really like the leek dumplings.

[lola]

Hmm, yes. I'll pop by Trader Joe's and see what kind of dumplings they have.

I guess my annoyance was that the person in question isn't "really" vegetarian, does eat chicken raised in an admittedly more humane manner before having its fool neck wrung. (also that she otherwise seems a trifle spoiled in ways I will not go into.)

When I started dating my husband, I was also kind of veg., and my sainted darling late mother in law would fix these big family dinners with one portion of say fish just for me. I would way rather have not had what I chose to eat highlighted that way, and in the old-fashioned manner just taken what I wanted from what was available. A host/ess is not a restaurant.

It happened that many of my daughters' friends from age 5 on came to our parties with Do Not Consume lists that seemed to change monthly: no tap water, no eggs or dairy, must be grown within 40 miles, etc.
I look on most food fads as a form of superstition: if you do these things, no harm will befall you.

My older brother once, when I told him it was OK if I ate fish because when you took it out of the water it automatically died, replied that if he put me under water that I would automatically die. I had to admit he had a point.

[Deleted]

Oh, lola, I had no idea that midwestern culinary terrorism had reached such proportions. In terms of parties, if I were hosting the event, I would publish 'must accept' lists which would preclude any sort of 'do not consume' list.

[Deleted]

I'm with Kerouac on this one Lola. Once it stops being fun and devoid of serendipity it's going to spill over into a tedious chore.
A nice big salad for everyone and some good bread and cheese handy ought to sate these seemingly high maintenance folks.
"A host/hostess is not a restaurant", key.......
Good luck and do keep us posted!

[lagatta]

That is true.

You aren't a restaurant. But dumplings should be served for the Lunar New Year! Like Kerouac, I like the leek ones. I've bought them with pork, chicken or tofu - the flavour is pretty much identical. Young people will drown them in sriracha sauce anyway.

[lola]

Thank you all for your moral support! Thanks to you, I was able to work through the annoyance part well in advance and concentrate on the essential love and hospitality aspects.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. The boyhood buddy turned out to have more amusing personal bear stories (and a few about snakes) than you would have thought possible for a midwesterner. Some of them involved my husband, who tried to correct him on details. My intimidating sister in law was relaxed and self deprecating. Wine flowed. The niece had explained her "selectarian" philosophy and then I was able to insert my opinion -- in a sympathetic way -- that it was a bore having others pay a lot of attention to what one ate.

I never could figure out how to blend the Mardi Gras theme with chinese so it would taste good on one plate, so settled for Asian/French ish. It worked great, though I forgot to bring out the fortune cookies. I did explain the veggie but not the free range status.

--chevre, crudites, crackers
--Tom Yum soup, stock made with previously purchased chicken who'd led a probably rough life. I order this in Thai restaurants, had never made it. It took a trip across town to the big inner city International Market to get galangal, lime leaves, and lemon grass stalks, and turned out nicely except for too many small pieces of smashed lemon grass.
--vegetable fried brown rice
--chicken in oyster sauce
--asian style salmon, baked in the marinade
--steamed broccoli
--white rice
--purchased egg rolls
--purchased vegetable dumplings; couldn't find any leek
--Oranges caramelisés
--gateau au chocolat
--fortune cookies that stayed in the bag as purchased.

Now if I could only figure out how to quell that feeling of panic the last half hour before a party. The best I can do is think of each guest individually and realize how little of a threat that person is. Still my heart pounds.

Kerouac, part of the reason we hung out with the group my daughters' friends came from was their artsy, creative, alternative-y-ness, so they were more extreme in the food nut area than average. The mothers seemed to share some sort of nutrition info line, send out group emails about the dangers of yet another common food.

In the natural course of time, those children have rebelled as they'e gotten older. One boy who looked appalled when I told him he could get drinking water from the kitchen tap is now 22; his mother told me recently that the reason he got the flu was from eating junk food in college.

I would bet in Midwestern urban areas that at least half of girls age 15 - 22 would ID themselves as vegetarian.

[lagatta]

For some reason, in artsy-alternative milieux in Canada, vegetarian self-identification is much more common among anglophones than among francophones.

Concern for the provenance of food and organics is common among the francophones in that subset and age group, vegetarianism not so much.

[Deleted]

The main trouble with the young female adult vegetarians is that they tend to say things like "I'm a vegetarian but I eat fish and chicken, almost no hamburgers, but I just can't pass up bacon for breakfast."

[bixaorellana]

Sounds lovely!

You realize that you did incorporate Mardi Gras by including its colors of gold (the salmon &/or the oranges), green (steamed broccoli), & purple (gateau au chocolat)? Okay, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch, but life itself is a compromise, as you now know better than anyone.

[Deleted]

It does sound positively lovely Lola. I'm so glad it worked out and that you were able to enjoy yourself despite the mild last minutes of panic which I think is perfectly normal for most of us. I like to think it gives us that last jolt of creativity before it's all over and said and done and then we can kick back sigh, and relax.

[Don Cuevas]

I think that vegetarians have entirely too much leverage over our menu planning.

[Deleted]

One thing that annoys me about such things is how many items they eat that are meat imitations.

[lagatta]

I really don't see why that annoys you if they don't force them on you. And sometimes it is the easiest solution, for example if people are grilling sausages.

[bjd]

I'm not surprised that more young Anglo Canadians self-identify as vegetarians than French-Canadians.

When my kids were younger, we often had language or other exchanges with teenagers from either Britain or Germany. It often happened that the receiving French families had a hard time coming to grips with British or German girls who claimed to be vegetarians -- it just did not compute. The boys rarely seemed to be vegetarian.

After one such visit, where the German girl was fussy about food, we found all kinds of garbage under the bed -- potato chip bags, etc.

We also housed a Scottish girl from the Strathclyde Youth Orchestra one year. We were extremely lucky -- her father was Italian and she ate everything. Other host families were not so lucky.

And not for food, but a friend of mine was extremely unlucky with an American girl she hosted -- the girl hadn't wanted to come, so she spent her time in her room, reading the bible and crying.

[lagatta]

Facilitating any youth-oriented conferences or seminars, I've observed the same trend - like the English/French divide here, youth from Germanic/Nothern cultures (including English-speakers) tend to be much more vegetarian and otherwise "restrictive" than Latin-language speakers and other southern Europeans. But also more inclined to eat junk outside mealtimes. These of course are trends; not everyone by any means.

Also more "straightedges" who will drink no wine or beer, and no caffeine. But more binge-drinkers. (Though sadly, "British binge-drinking" is now sometimes observed in southern Europe).

Still (remember the thread I started on supermarkets, and how much an observant stroll through a supermarket can tell you about locals' habits) I was struck by how TINY the junk-food (chips and company) aisle tends to be in Italian supermarkets, even now. There is quite a lot of junk in Dutch supermarkets, and they eat a lot of sweet baked goods (which are very tasty, often made with real butter, but still not something to overindulge in).

I wonder whether that American girl was severely depressed, from a horrible fundamentalist family, or both...

[Deleted]

Feb 15, 2013 11:29:18 GMT lagatta said:

I really don't see why that annoys you if they don't force them on you. And sometimes it is the easiest solution, for example if people are grilling sausages.

I'm talking about the ones who lecture you about cruelty to animals and then eat chicken-flavoured crisps or imitation bacon. If you turn against meat, you should not go hunting for artificial substitutions. That's just my opinion. (Meanwhile, I would never plan to grill sausages in the first place if I knew a vegetarian would be present, because the real ones find the aroma nauseating.)