- Now go back through your menu and work out a schedule for each dish. The schedule can be vague for early items such as
Friday afternoon: Make chocolate mousse
but should become more detailed and specific as you get closer to serving time
Sat. 3:45pm: Remove roast from fridge and warm for 2 hours.
And on a related note, do you have enough kitchen timers? - At this point you will almost certainly have found new conflicts and need to go back through the menu yet again.
- If you have helpers, assign them tasks at this point — and think about kitchen space in general. Decide where prep will occur and who does it, who will man the stove top, who will man the oven (it might be the stove-top person, but might not). And think about how much "people" space the kitchen has — you may not have room for Aunt Maude to make her famous Peach Surprise.
Here's a link to an example of the Excel-based spreadsheet I use for party planning and here's a link to an empty spreadsheet (you can download these spreadsheets by opening them and clicking on "Save as"). Note how, as the party time approaches, the intervals become smaller. In each section the times in the yellow boxes are "key" times and the times above queue off them so, for example, if you change 8:00 PM in the Party Day section to 8:30 PM all the times above it in the same section will echo the change. To add additional times simply insert rows prior to the top row in the section and then copy the filled time cell below the new rows to the new cells above.
If you look closely at the example spreadsheet you'll note small red triangles in the corners of some cells. These are comments and I use them for adding notes such as how I plan to garnish a plate.