Giving your party a perfect start

It was my first real party. Sure, friends practically lived at my place throughout college because there was booze and food at any time of the day. However, this was a formal dinner.

The kind of party, where as a child I was put to bed at 8pm by my parents. The door was shut before the first guests arrived.

Then the drinks and conversation flowed into the wee hours of the morning.
The entrées  and dessert were ready.

I suddenly realised I had nothing but potato chips for starters. I panicked and made a hysterical phone call to my mother.

After admonishing me for not planning well, she told me her secret: “Keep it simple. You don’t want guests to feel full before the main course is served.”

With an hour to go before guests arrived, I put together two simple starters: cheese spread with capsicum bits on biscuits and salsa sauce with crackers. For the first, all I did was mix finely-chopped capsicum to a box of cheese spread, added Tabasco, salt and pepper and smeared it on Monaco biscuits.

The salsa sauce required boiling tomatoes, running them in a mixer and then adding in chopped spring onions, salt, pepper and a hint of sugar. Two years later, friends still remind me that they loved the starters that day.

Store-bought potato chips are quite vanilla when you’ve made an extra effort on the entrées . Even a quickly-prepared dip, served with pita bread, tortilla chips or even salted biscuits can make an appetising spread.

Kalyan Karmakar, a 36-year-old market researcher who also writes a food blog, used to order the starters at a party. Over time, he realised it’s more personal to put together the starters than order them in.

“When I’m the guest, I feel touched that my host has gone out of his/her way to prepare everything, even simple starters,” Karmakar says.

He picks up ingredients like sausages every time he goes shopping, just so he can be prepared for an impromptu party.

His ‘sausage on the rocks’ involves heating a teaspoon of olive oil, stirring in a teaspoon of finely-chopped peeled garlic, 250g of sausages cut into rings, and adding “whatever you want or have at home” — crushed black pepper, ketchup, or Tabasco sauce.

“While I’m in the kitchen, guests usually follow me in to see how it’s being made, and we start chatting,” Karmakar says. He turns off the burner and after he pours out the drinks, he brings in the plate of sausages.

After hosting and attending a number of parties, I’ve realised kebabs  don’t do the trick as starters. Kebabs are too heavy on the stomach and guests lose their appetites after only a few rich kebabs each.

Shaheen Peerbhai, 23, who gave up an IT career to pursue her love for cooking and is now a popular food blogger, says, “A cheese platter or cocktail nuts work well with drinks. It’s useful to keep them handy for an impromptu party.”

Simple doesn’t necessarily mean less elegant. My brother lives in a studio apartment and has to improvise without a burner, so has to forego elaborate appetisers for his parties. (He does have the fanciest glasses for every kind of alcohol, but doesn’t own a stove.)

At a ‘cocktail-themed’ party he hosted, where guests were dressed up in their finest dresses and waistcoats, one of the starters he served was olives and diced cubes of cheese on toothpicks to go with martinis.

When making an elaborate starter, Peerbhai prefers finishing most of the work beforehand.

“This way, I get to spend time with my guests,” she says, adding that she makes three or four types of starters to suit different palates.

But for Peerbhai, who likes experimenting with different dishes, light starters also serve another function: they buy her time to bake elaborate dishes like lasagne and risotto while guests enjoy their drinks. It is a dinner party after all: dinner is the prime attraction.