Mid Autumn Festival 2019
2 weeks ago was the Mid Autumn Festival.
Ya boy likes Chinese food.
You may see where this is going, but TL;DR I made a crapload of Chinese food to celebrate.
My college roommate, Brian, and I developed a tradition in college where we look for any excuse to cook obscene amounts of Chinese food. Mid Autumn Festival provided the latest excuse, so we cooked our biggest meal yet. Since so much effort goes into throwing these events, I want to share some tips on how we make it work.
Creating the Menu
The first thing we thought about is what dishes are must-haves. Then we filled in the rest of the menu from there. When planning a menu, there are many factors to consider. Some big ones are:
- Do we have the tools and chefs to prepare this dish while making our other dishes?
- Can we scale up the cooking process to make enough for everyone?
- How confident are we that this is gonna go well? There’s always a chance that something new and difficult is gonna flop.
For our tools, we had a stove, 2 woks, and a Big Green Egg. For chefs, we had 6 people who were all pretty comfortable in the kitchen, especially with Chinese food. Bottom line: we had a solid foundation to build a meal with.
Front row: Rich
The Main Event
We decided on a Smoked Char Siu Pork as the main dish. This would only utilize the Big Green Egg and free up the rest of the kitchen for other dishes. Furthermore, smoking meat scales extremely well. Making 20 lbs is far less work than double the effort needed to make 10 lbs.
Sounds perfect right?
It would have been if we had a recipe. A few months earlier, I smoked an underwhelming pork butt in their Big Green Egg, so I wanted another crack at it. Plus it would have been tough to make enough food without using the Egg for something. So we did it. We were gambling the main dish for a 25-person dinner party on an experiment with a cooking method I’ve never gotten quite right… I like to think it turned out okay, though.
Rounding Things Out
Then we had to figure out what other dishes we wanted. David suggested Tiger Skin Peppers and Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup, and both seemed like delicious additions that we hadn’t made at previous events. They would use a wok and an instant pot, and provided the opportunity to learn new things.
To complete the menu, we decided to serve foods we’d made previously with success. Jen is a pro at making Dan Dan Noodles. Plus, these be made in bulk in advance and chilled. David could then make Ma Po Tofu (one of his specialties) in the second wok. And Brian wanted to throw in smashed cucumber salad just for fun.
Final Menu
So at this point, we had a menu and could divide the responsibilities. Here’s a summary of our menu with notes on how we divided up resources:
- BBQ Char Siu Pork
- Rob
- Big Green Egg
- Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup
- Emily
- Instant Pot, Pot on back burner to boil noodles
- Dan Dan Noodles
- Jen the Dan Dan Queen
- Made in advance, not competing for resources
- Tiger Skin Peppers
- Brian
- Wok 1, 1st front stove burner
- Ma Po Tofu
- David
- Wok 2, 2nd front stove burner
- Smashed Cucumber Salad
- Can be prepped in advance, mixed before serving
How much is enough?
Now we had to figure out how to scale everything. To do this, I imagine how much I would eat, and then multiply that by the number of people. As a general rule of thumb, I’ll estimate a pound of meat per person, 1/3+ lb noodles, and make sure we’ve got enough veggies and “fluff”. Fluff is something like rice; it’s cheap and variable in case my guests aren’t afraid of the meat sweats and show up ready to FEAST.
Usually a few sad excuses for dinner guests don’t eat their allocated 3 plates of food. As a result of this disrespect for my cooking and my hatred for waste, I have to shoulder the burden of eating amazing food the following week for lunch. Bummer, but I always find a way to forgive them.
Grocery List
Once we figure out how we want to scale everything, we make a master grocery list. I did this in Google Sheets by logging the scaled-up amounts of each ingredient in each recipe in the columns. Once all of the ingredients are logged, I organized the rows by store, and section so that it would be easy to determine if we had everything. Trust me, this is important to avoid missing key ingredients!
Finally, I convert those quantities into a total amount needed that we use while shopping. Before shopping, Brian and I went through the kitchen to find what staple ingredients we already had to trim things down to a final list.
After the grocery list, there is just final piece to the puzzle…
Game Day Strategy
A great deal of planning has gone into this event so far, but now it’s time to think about actually doing. How will we make this epic feast a reality?
We wanted to have food ready around 5:30. Starting with this, I tried to estimate timing of the steps leading up to serving food and then count backwards from there.
I broke things up into 3 phases:
- Slow cook phase: Start cooking around 1-2ish with bbq pork and taiwanese beef.
- Prep phase: roast peanuts, grind sichuan peppercorns, de-seed peppers, Tiger pepper sauce, Dan Dan Noodles, cucumber dressing, bok choy to cook with both noodle dishes
- Execution phase – 4:30pm:
- Make Rice
- Boil water in covered stock pot on the back burner
- Wok 1 Mapo Tofu
- Wok 2 Tiger skin peppers (While Wok 1 is going)
- Smash cucumbers
- Slice Pork
- Prep serving area, set out garnishes, plates, chopsticks
Going by this, we’d want to start around 1pm. Factoring in a large, non-scientific extra amount of buffer time, we decided to meet at 11am to shop. This would give us extra time in case, I don’t know, one of the chefs disappears to go visit a sex shop. Not like that would ever happen…
Bon Appetit!
That’s what the Chinese say before they eat. (I know it’s French, but can you just let me have this???)
Above all, the meal was a huge success. The guests loved the food and the whole experience of watching my friends find joy in food is extremely rewarding. Don’t get me wrong, I love the food. But the whole “sharing” thing isn’t all bad. Especially when Joe brings the ‘claw.
