Extreme multi-tasking: Be the Cook

I agreed to cook for co-worker Julie Kay's birthday. Since I had never cooked for a party before, I had to ramp up more than the quantity of ingredients.

The night of the event was intense. But I was in some kind of zone. The only thing I burned was a tortilla! Considering everything I was orchestrating, that's kind of amazing. I was stirring shrimp in chili sauce in a sauce pan, making rice, making a noodle-slaw salad, grilling brats, keeping an eye on the chicken pot, warming up molé in a crock-pot, flipping tortillas on a hot comal.

But all of this got started at the start of the week.

I sat down a few times to make lists, estimate times, figure out the coordinating steps I would need to perform to pull this off. I had a brief stint as a short-order cook in a Dallas diner in my late teens. I was awful.

This was going to have to come together better, but I had more experience. We expected 15 people and I wanted three entreés and some sides. I started cooking Friday: boiling chicken, separating the broth to make the molé, boiling potatoes.

The chicken molé involved buying chicken and buying a jar of Doña Maria molé. There would be shrimp in a spicy sauce, so I had to get the ingredients for a chili paste.

And just in case I had any folks who had problems with seafood, or who didn't want anything as exotic as an Aztec gravy on their chicken, I brought along Kiolbassa polish sausages and a can of sauerkraut.

As you can see, the sausage went over well.

This was all that was left -->

 The sides. I chopped beets and boiled them. I chopped plantain, but it wasn't as ripe as I had hoped. I've tried this before and it came out great. Grill the plantain in butter then add it to the boiled beats with salt and hot sauce. They turned out okay on this occasion, but the flavor wasn't what I was aiming for. Rats!

I was pairing the beet-plantain side with the chicken molé. I paired the spicy shrimp with a white rice that was cooked with cilantro.

Recipe for the shrimp: http://www.carmensdelacalle.com/recipes.html

I didn't follow the recipe, though. I took the ingredients for the chili paste and threw them in the blender. I was supposed to boil them in water, the sauteé the shrimp in the boiled chili paste. What I ended up doing was boiling water at the party and mixing the paste into that with the shrimp. We ended up with boiled spicy shrimp over rice. It was still pretty good!

There was also a Ramen noodle slaw that I whipped together. Got requests for the recipe. Chop cabbage. Crush noodles and sprinkle them on a cookie sheet with sliced almond and pumpkin seed. Toast in the oven for a minute. Mix the shrimp sauce packets from the noodle packages in vegetable oil, and pour this over the cabbage. Throw in the toasted noodles/almonds/pumpkin seed and add sesame seed. Toss and serve.

I made a Texas-style cornbread. Ingredients included chopped poblano pepper, cream-style corn, graded cheddar cheese.

I made a decent potato salad to go with the sausage and sauerkraut, but honestly, it was overkill. Nobody touched it. There was plenty to eat.

I took over the kitchen, which was really small. So when everything was ready, I had them line up at the door and hand me their plate and tell me what they wanted.

Chaos on the kitchen? No. But I crammed stuff onto every inch of counter space I had.

The party was in Miami and I live in Delray Beach, so all the prepped stuff and ingredients had to go in the trunk and make a 50-mile journey before I could set up again in a kitchen for the home-stretch.

We finished off the shrimp and rice and made a respectable dent in all that chicken.

I'd like to try doing something like this again. It was hard work, but it was fun.

Buen provecho!