Entertaining on a Time Budget

In our society of power breakfasts, endless meetings and overfilled schedules, it seems as if no one has the time to entertain guests except for special occasions.  Don’t let the fact that you’re on a limited time budget keep you from enjoying the company of your friends and family.   With minimal planning and preparation, you can host a dinner party on a day’s notice.  Use these tips to plan a get together that will give you and your guests a welcome respite from the rat race we face everyday.

Planning – Keep it Simple
Planning your meal shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.  Get a piece of paper and write down these 3 things:

1. Number of Guests – Include all possible guests, including significant others.  It’s always better to have too much than too little.
2. Time Frame – You’ll want to decide what time the guests should arrive and what time dinner will be served so that you’ll know exactly how much time you have to devote to preparation.
3. Menu – Arguably the most difficult aspect of any dinner party, remember to keep it simple.  Stick with dishes you are familiar with and that can be prepared quickly.  If you’re stuck on this step, some menu options will be provided later in this article.

Once you have this information, you can do an inventory of your kitchen and decide what you need to purchase.  Create a shopping list being sure to include any decorations and beverages along with the food you need to buy.   Organize the list so that you can move quickly through the store.  You should be able to locate everything you need at any major grocery store.

Invitations – No Need to Be Formal
If your guest list is small,  you can call each guest to issue a personal invitation.  If you’re planning on a larger group, or if you just don’t have the time, email comes in very handy.  There are several invitation based websites that can be used to great advantage when planning a dinner party.  Just fill in a few fields and you’re a click away from reaching all your guests.

Decorations – Nothing Fancy
Sticking with the theme of keeping it simple, decorations needn’t be too elaborate.  Simple candles and fresh flowers are always a great way to go.  Fresh flowers like Astromeria can be purchased very cheaply at most grocery stores.  While not necessary, having a linen tablecloth is always a nice touch and doesn’t require more than minimal ironing.

The Meal – Options and Suggestions
If you don’t know what to prepare for your meal, here are some suggestions for elegant and easy to prepare recipes that will impress your guests.

Beverages – The easiest way to handle beverages is to set up a bar/beverage area where guests can prepare their own drinks.  That way if you are putting the finishing touches on the meal, you won’t be interrupted every time a new guest arrives, you can just direct them to the bar.  Be sure to include ice and glasses with your choice of beverages in the set-up.

Appetizers– Nothing could be easier than providing appetizers like selected cheeses with crackers or a vegetable tray with dip.  If you have the time to cut your own vegetables, you can save money, but precut vegetable trays will save you time.  Pre-made spinach or artichoke dip served with a hearty bread is also a good, quick appetizer.

Salad– Pre-prepared salads come in very handy if you’re on a time budget and can be augmented with fresh vegetables of your choosing if you have the time.  To add a dash of class and yum factor, add French fried onions and cheese (feta is usually a good choice) to your salad.

Sides – The simplest and quickest side options is the basic baked potato.  To create a restaurant quality baked potato, wet the skin of the potato and dip it in sea salt.  Then wrap each potato in paper towel before microwaving it.   After cooking, firmly roll the potato before removing the towel to pull the potato away from the skin. Cut each potato once down the center and it’s ready to serve.  Rice and flavored rice packages are also make quick and delicious sides.

Soup – Many restaurants and restaurant supply companies offer delicious frozen soups that can be quickly heated up for a delicious soup course.

Entrees– There are many recipes available for meat, poultry, seafood and pasta dishes with quick preparation times.  A search of the many available recipe sites on the internet can provide you with a recipe that fits your taste.  Here is one such simple and elegant choice:

London Broil w/Garlic Au Jus

Hands-on preparation time: 20 minutes
Actual time to prepare – 2 hours

Ingredients:
1.5lbs of 1 ½” – 2” thick London broil (top round)
2 cloves of fresh garlic
1 can beef broth
1 cube beef bouillon
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup butter
¼ cup water

1)     In a small saucepan, boil the beef broth, bouillon and brown sugar for 15 minutes to reduce it.
2)     Remove the broth mixture from heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes
3)     Create a marinade by adding the garlic (pressed or diced), lemon juice, and olive oil to the broth mixture
4)     Marinate the London broil for 1 hour at room temperature
5)     Retaining the marinade, broil the meat on a roasting rack for 8 minutes on each side
6)     Remove the meat from the oven and allow to sit for 8 minutes
7)     Meanwhile return the marinade to the saucepan, add water and butter and bring to a boil
8)     Carve the London Broil into thin slices on a slight angle, cover with Au Jus and serve on a platter with the remaining Au Jus on the side.

For the casual, recreational bicyclist, choosing the right bike can be confusing and even frustrating.  You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars, but you do want to make sure you get a bike of sufficient quality and comfort that you can ride it with pleasure for more than just a year or two.  You are somewhere in between the consumer who goes into a discount store and buys the glitziest bicycle available for the wad of bills in his wallet and the bicyclist who strolls into the best bike shop in town, hails all the employees by name, spends the whole rest of the day talking components and races and leaves the store at closing, starry-eyed but empty-handed.   Here are some helpful pointers to help you choose the right bike for your body and your purposes.

Before you even go near a bike shop, do some thinking. The most obvious choice you have to make in buying a new bike is deciding what kind of bike you want.  Road bike or mountain bike may seem the question, but it’s really a little bigger a question than that. Depending on your age, health, and intended usage, you may want to consider cruiser bikes, recumbent bikes, and the increasingly popular bikes known as hybrid or commuter bikes.

You want a road bike if you are involved in road racing, certainly. If your love is riding on trails, you will definitely want a mountain bike.  If your primary love on the trails is downhill racing, you will want a specialized mountain bike.  If you have physical limitations, find bicycling painful, or just have money to burn and a yearning for something different, you should check out recumbents.  If you just use a bike for pedalling around a basically flat town a few miles a day, perhaps you’d enjoy the fun of a single speed, fat tired cruiser bike.  And very many of you will be attracted with good reason to the hybrid or commuter bicycles that give you some of the advantages of all these kinds of bikes.

These hybrid bikes give you the wide range of gears riders learned to love with the advent of mountain bikes in the eighties, combined with the lightness and grace of the road bike. They are usually ridden upright, like the cruiser bikes, but don’t carry the weight or the bulk of the shock absorbing features of mountain bikes.  Their tires are somewhere between the skinny, lightly spoked wheels of a road racer’s model and the heavy knobbies of a genuine mountain bike.  These bikes are light enough to be fast on roads and stable enough to ride off-road on gravel or good trails.  They have a sufficient range of gears to get you up steep hills without walking and respond quickly enough to meet the demands of riding in urban traffic.

Once you know the kind of bike you seek, go into a few bike shops and talk to a knowledgeable bike seller. Amateur and casual riders often make the mistake of thinking the only size consideration on a bike is the rider’s height, but no good bike shop employee will let you out of the shop without paying attention to the unique aspects of your height.  A 5′6″ rider with long arms and a short torso will need a much different bike frame symmetry than a 5′6″ rider with short arms and long legs!  The length of the top bar on the bike, the adjustability of the seat post, the height of the stem that supports the handlebars, all these factors and more matter enormously to the fit of a bicycle and consequently to the pleasure or the pain you’ll find in riding it.  Manufacturers have varying frame geometries and models have their own variations.

You cannot really buy a bike intelligently at a discount store without knowledgeable employees or policies that allow you to test ride a bike before purchase. The only way to buy intelligently from a big discount store is to identify the right bike elsewhere and then purchase the same bike from the discounter.  Whether this is really fair to the bike shop that gave you the real service is something you have to decide for yourself.  You should never buy a bike without test riding it, and if you’re buying it as a present, without making sure the recipient has the right to return it if it doesn’t suit their riding needs.

Once you have done all this, you get to consider what is really the plum of your decision making process in choosing the right bike: the way the bike looks.  Bicycles are beautiful machines.  You should love not only the way you feel on it, but the way it looks as you fly down the hill on it, a blur of shiny colors and silvers and speed.

The message that 9 year-old Carol brought home from school was depressingly predictable.  Two younger girls had narrowly escaped abduction the day before, so could parents please take extra precautions getting children to school and bringing them home.

Although every successful abduction is one abduction too many, there are some very large numbers published that probably need to be clarified a little. There is statistical information from the UK  that shows around one tenth of all reported abductions were successful and that a quarter are what they call parental abductions which could be classified more as custody cases than kidnapping.  Although every parental abduction is a painful event for the family involved, it shouldn’t add to stranger danger in the community.

Discounting other types of abduction where there is an established relationship between the victim and the offender leaves around half of all reported abductions that can be classified as sexually motivated child abductions.  The target victim is, on average, 10 years old, male or female with fair skin.  That specification is a pretty close match for Carol and also Chris, who is two years older than his sister but equally blond and blue-eyed.

So, for what seems the tenth time this year we sit them down for a refresher discussion about strangers, reminding them to trust their instincts.  “If something feels wrong inside, it probably is wrong.”

We confirm that it’s OK to say “No” to an adult, to find a grown-up they know and trust and to tell all.

We encourage Chris to use his Taekwondo training and to kick out if he feels he is in danger and tell Carol to kick, bite and generally make a noise if she feels someone is trying to get her to do something she does not want to.

Finally we remind them that we do not have secrets in our family and if anyone tries to convince them otherwise, they are wrong.

The note from school has also reminded me to update the information cards I carry with me at all times.  Basically, for each child I have an up-to-date photograph in my wallet with the following details printed on the back:

• Name and nicknames
• Eye, hair and skin color
• Height and weight
• Identifying features (birthmarks, scars, physical characteristics)

Most abducted children are recovered or killed in the first 3 hours, so the first 15 to 30 minutes after a successful abduction are critical. If you can hand the police a photograph with all of this data immediately, they have clear information on which to make an identification.  Such clarity can be vital as parents of abductees are also very stressed at this time and are likely to be vague and disorientated, themselves.

It would be so easy to carry on believing that it will never happen to us but with the odds being about 1 in 7,000 there is more chance that my child will be abducted than me winning the national Lottery.