Easy Way to Serve Family Style

Here’s our PRETEND Thanksgiving table~

“PRETEND TABLE???” you ask.

Yes…

THIS is our REAL table; our FAMILY table.

If you look carefully you can see that the babies’ place settings are on the far right and far left (on either side of me, :), and where the table legs accommodate them best).

Can you find the differences between the two tables?

Whenever our immediate family gathers—six adults and three children, ages 19 months to 6 years—I always, always, always serve our meal family style. It’s just such a natural way for me, grounded in my Cuban upbringing, where abundance, good food, and lively conversation are all part of a meal. That’s how our meals were served when I was growing up, and my husband and I continued to do it that way when our boys were growing up.

So as much as I love to set a table with a beautiful centerpiece and overflowing with interesting touches, I don’t envision such tables as being for our family—those tables are my PRETEND tables. For our family meals I set the place settings correctly, but the “centerpiece” is the bounty we will share!

Family-style serving speaks of family and abundance. I love the sharing that goes around the table, “Todd, I’m running low on dressing,” or “Could you pass the pickled eggs, please?” or my favorite, “Having this platter of roast beef right in front of me is dangerous” (as he takes a few more nibbles). All this just does a mother’s heart good.

If you elect to go this route, I assure you that a table overflowing with food, dishes and goblets or glasses, and baskets of bread will surely bring into focus the abundance of blessings that surround you.

 

Easy Way to Serve Family Style

I know a lot of cooks don’t want extra people in the kitchen when they’re cooking—they want people out of the way, but these “people” are MY people, and I love it when they come in and go straight to the kitchen to say hi to mom “check out” the progress, do a little taste testing, and really, to help with whatever is left to be done. Some of you who have followed me for any time know that one of our sons is a professional chef, and the other has been managing restaurants for many years, so they know their way around a kitchen, and in fact know a lot more than I do (“Really, BJ, I need some knife skills, PRONTO!”), so they really do help!

All the help extends to getting the food to the table, and that’s where my Serving Family Style ORGANIZING STRATEGIES come in handy.

Serving Family Style ORGANIZING STRATEGY #1:

  Label all the serving dishes.

I started labeling the serving pieces years ago, as an organizing strategy for myself after one time too many of grabbing one of the dishes I’d set out to serve the corn soufflé (recipe here) and then finding that I needed just that dish for another side dish…. So it was a sanity-preservation move to avoid the last-minute Musical Serving Pieces game.

Now, Strategy #1is a huge help with so many cooks and helpers in the kitchen. Whoever is helping to serve can look right at the labels and find the piece that is assigned to the food. Easy way to “manage your help.”

 

Serving Family Style ORGANIZING STRATEGY #2*:

Set the corresponding serving utensil next to the serving dish.

As you can see in the picture above, every dish has the corresponding serving utensil next to it, except the on-the-rocks glass that is intended for finger food (one of my husband’s childhood favorites~~green onions). This will help your family to not use the fork intended for the turkey to serve the potatoes, leaving only a slotted spoon for the turkey, and requiring that you get {back} up to locate another serving fork.

 

Serving Family Style ORGANIZING STRATEGY #3:

Use lidded serving pieces to keep the food warm.

Okay, I admit it (as I’ve done over and over in this blog): I love silver and crystal and china, and…beautiful things. But I have three covered silver casseroles (think chafing dishes without the stand/warmer) that I press into service over and over again BECAUSE THEY ARE SO PRACTICAL.

Here’s the practical beauty to these casseroles: The Pyrex liner allows you to bake in them, and when you’re ready to serve you can add extra-hot water in the casserole bottom, so the hot water, combined with the fact that it has a lid, keeps your food WARM. And yes, they look pretty on the table without being too formal.

(To polish/not polish??  Completely up to you. I can live with the tarnished/shabby look, then turn around and completely enjoy the beauty of freshly polished silver.) 

 

Serving Family Style ORGANIZING STRATEGY #4:

Save your linens…USE UNDERPLATES.

TWO good reasons to use underplates:

1. To catch drips/save your linens;
2. To make it easier to handle hot dishes.

Oh, and did you notice the asterisk on Strategy # 2?

* Well, this technically isn’t a strategy…it’s a proper-setting tip: The serving piece never goes into the food until the first person is going to use it. The inclination is to place the utensil in the food, but nope! On the table it stays until it’s really going to be used to serve the food. How often do you see beautiful magazine sets where the serving piece is in the food, and it’s obvious none has been served from it yet? Do you study magazine pictures like I do? They’re such a source of inspiration and entertainment to me!

I hope these tips are helpful to you. I wish you many meals at a table laden with the bounties of our land and the love of your family around it.

Next I’m going to do an easy dessert bar and other switcheroos that will simplify holiday meals, so before I do that post, what other tips would you have me add to serving family style? What has worked well for you that needs to be shared?

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From my nest to yours~

Zuni

Taming the Monster in the Basement

The good news is we have a HUGE basement…the bad news is it’s a HUGE basement!  It’ll be eight years next month that we moved into our home, and it was only about six months ago that I decided made peace with the fact that we’re staying—at least for a while.  You see, we moved from the BIG house, thinking we were going to simplify our lives, only to realize, about two days after the move, that we NEEDED a big house.  Too much furniture, too many pretty things I (well, actually we, to some extent) didn’t want to part with.  So….thank heavens for a big basement!

When I finally decided to unpack EVERYTHING a few months ago (we’re staying, remember??), our basement looked like this:

Stuff everywhere, as I got my arms around the massive amount of stuff we had.  Yes, in the old house we DID use all these Christmas trees!  And the hammock…and the wrought iron plant stands…

Then, to make matters worse :) my brother and SIL introduced me to auctions…hmmm.  Just what I needed.  A NEW monster was created, and sometimes our basement looked like this:

Shelves organized, then new stuff would come in.  And the problem with auctions is that you sometimes end up with things you don’t want too.  It’s called box lots, where you bid on a box of stuff because of ONE thing you want, but you get the whole box full of other stuff you don’t want.  Do I need more snack sets (see the boxes stacked under the table?)?  Not.a.single.one.  My parents always had nice big parties—as in no paper plates, regardless of the number of guests—and the snack plates and punch cups were always put to use.  I think it’s a safe estimate to say that they had more than 100 of each, some of which I now have.  And then there are the linens…I can hardly pass up a fine piece of hand-embroidered linen.  See them stacked on the basket? :)

Oh, and did I mention punch bowls?  I have a “thing” about big bowls and punch bowls—maybe it’s my dreams of always having large family gatherings.

This one was an auction find that came with 36 punch cups.  Wait!  I just said I didn’t need more snack sets!  Ahhh, but I DID need THESE.  I really like this pattern!!, AND besides, this one came with the stand!  My identical punchbowl didn’t have a stand…I NEEDED it.  Oh, and did I say I got the whole thing for $3???!!!  Yes, THREE DOLLARS!!  How could I pass it up??  You understand, right?  (And to the right edge of the picture are other punch bowls, and upstairs on the buffet is our sterling one my MIL gave us years ago, which I’ve happily used often—you can see it HERE.)

To redeem myself now that I’ve shown you the bad and the ugly, while all that was going on, the shelves we bought when we first moved here WERE organized.  The problem was the ADDITIONAL stuff from the unpacking, coupled with the new auction stuff…

So we bought more shelves and made progress taming the monster:

But there was always more to go…

But now, I’m happy to report, THE MONSTER IS TAMED!

Yes…new dishes to be put away.  My SIL gave me the Pottery Barn plaid ones for Christmas.  Yippee!!  Lucky me!  I’m anxious to use them, so I’m thinking about how to use them for a non-Christmas table.  Any ideas?

The Christmas things were tamed, but now they’re in a different place, to allow more room for my “play room.”  (There’s still lots of room on the other side too, so the little chickadees are going to get a play room to ride their plasma riders down here too!)

The crystal was safely tucked away months ago when I unpacked.

And unused pieces of furniture were put to good use…

The forest was tamed and covered to keep the dust off.

But here is my FAVORITE fix!!  (I wish I could claim credit for the napkin solution, because it’s SO CLEVER, but no…I got it from Mary at Home is Where the Boat Is.  Isn’t it brilliant?)

  Shoe holders!  They’re the PERFECT solution for napkins.  I’ve had this ton of napkins in deep drawers in the buffet, in baskets, on shelves. None was the perfect solution, but I do believe this is going to be!  (I used kids’ shoe holders because they’re the perfect size for folded napkins.)  I’ve wanted to get a clothes hanger for the tablecloths for some time, and NOW was the time.  I have so many tablecloths that it’s always been impossible to store them in one place, and while these aren’t all of them, I was able to free up quite a bit of drawer and closet space by moving the good linen ones down and putting others here too.  I will check with Susan at My Place to Yours—she’s the expert on caring for fine vintage linens—on how to cover them.  I’m pretty sure she’s going to tell me to get rid of the dry cleaner bags.  (Susan, if you’re reading this, please advise!)

 

So here’s how this spot turned out.  I keep the seasonal placemats I’m using on a regular basis upstairs, but these were tying up valuable drawer space in the dresser under the shelf with stemware.  Now I have EMPTY DRAWERS!!  That means more room for more stuff! :)

So any other suggestions?  How do you store your vintage linens?  Oh, and don’t forget that I’d like some ideas on how to use my new plaid dishes NOW—I don’t want to wait till next Christmas!

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