How I Cook a Big Meal (and get it all on the table)

Whenever I post a photograph or a video of a large meal I've cooked, I inevitably get some verion of the same question: How to you finish everything at the same time? How do you get it on the table hot?

The answer is... it takes planning! The first thing I do whenever I'm planning a large-format meal with multiple dishes is sit down with pencil and paper (or finger and notepad app) and start planning.

But first, a little background on the video above:

Last weekend I spent some time in the Nashville area. On Saturday I spent the day at my cousin Beth Ann and her husband Francois' sheep farm in Bell Buckle, about an hour southeast of Nashville. On the farm I got to visit with my uncle Bud, who is turning 89 this year, and ate well as Francois and his Algerian neighbor roasted a lamb on a spit for Francois' 65th birthday. I spent the night in their off-the-grid cabin, stargazing and waking up with the sheep (except for one of them, that is).

I promise this is all relevant. Or at least some of it.

On Sunday, I spent the afternoon and evening at the home of the composer and acoustic bass iconoclast, Edgar Meyer, as he and his trio rehearsed for their upcoming tour (their Seattle date is October 16th–see you there–but check their calendar to see if they're coming near you.)

Aside from being a multi-Grammy Award-winner, Edgar is also a huge fan of Alice Waters , a fact that came in really handy when I offered to cook dinner for the band and some other guests.

I'd spent that morning at Belle Fleur farms, a very small organic farm right by my cousin's arm in Bell Buckle. The farmers, Mathieu and Kelsey, took me through the rows of their crops and we ended up picking an array of incredible produce. Red, golden, and Chioggia beets (with their tops), Chantenay carrots, Hakurei turnips (and their tops!), red and green french breakfast radishes (and their tops!), heirloom collard greens, yellow wax beans, escarole frisée, parsley, and dill, and a dozen eggs straight from the coop.

The most difficult part of cooking a big meal like this is the planning. There are just so many directions you can go. So the trick is to just commit to a couple things you know are going to be delicious, then work from there, trying to fill out the menu and really thinking about the various cooking and reheating methods you have, making sure that you aren't relying solely on dishes that must be prepared last minute. Try and limit your hot dishes to just two or three, and make sure that only one or two of those require a last minute oven, with the other working on the stovetop, grill, microwave, or whatever heat source you have.

With that in mind, here's the manu I came up with. It required pretty minimal shopping

Roasted Beets with pumpkin seeds, parsley, sheep’s milk yogurt, and blood orange

(Very similar to this Roasted Beet Salad recipe, but with yogurt instead of ricotta and pumpkin seeds instead of hazelnuts.)

Wax Beans with radishes, dill, Parmesan, anchovies, and coddled eggs

(essentially my Sloppy Caesar Salad, but with wax beans and radish in place of Romaine and croutons.)

Hakurei Turnips  with Chantenay carrots, sautéed turnip greens, white miso, and beurre D’Isigny

(I didn't have a recipe here, but I tossed the vegetables with white miso and olive oil, roasted them, then made a basic wine-free beurre blanc with miso I pressed through a fine mesh strainer.)

Heirloom Collards and Beet Greens with poached eggs and salsa macha 

(I poach the eggs using the strainer method I wrote about in my book, The Food Lab, and that I demonstrate here.)

Roasted chicken with chicken fat potatoes, frisée and arugula salad, and lemon jus

(The chicken was a spatchcock, like I wrote about my book, The Food Lab which you can also find here on Serious Eats. I did not use any specific recipe for the jus or the chicken, but the basic technique is what's important. The potatoes were one of my most popular recipes of all time, my Best Crispy Roast Potatoes (yes, I do actually mean "best" in this case.))

With the menu in hand, here's how I cooked it all:

3 1/2 hours before dinner:

I started prepping about 3 1/2 hours before I expected folks to sit down. This would build in enough time for me to prep everything, then relax for the last 2 hours or so, only checking in occasionally to make sure the potatoes and chicken are roasting properly, with a little push to finish everything during the last half hour before dinner.

• first thing I did was get the oven on and preheating to 400ish, and get a pot of salted water on for the beans, and a saucepan of water on for the boiled and poached eggs. 

• Next I washed the beets and get them into foil pouches to roast (the method is on @seriouseats and in my book) since they take a long time and need to cool before I can make the salad.

• Next I got the potatoes peeled and started them boiling. I kept a lazy eye on them and drained them when they were soft, tossed them with some oil, and spread them on an oiled roasting tray for later. 

• Next all the other vegetable prep - washing and cleaning and getting them into whatever state they need to be to finish (so all the braising greens separated into leaves and stems since the stems cook longer, the beans washed and trimmed, the frisée and arugula trimmed and washed and spun dry, the carrots and turnips trimmed, scrubbed, and split, the radishes sliced on a mandolin and stored in water, picked the herbs etc. Other folks pitched in to help here). 

• I separated the vegetables and kept them roughly organized. At this stage I like to put anything that will be tossed or cooked together into a bowl together. If the ingredients are going to be tossed—like the salad greens or the turnips and carrots—I’ll put them directly into the bowl I’m going to toss them in later so that I can just add the dressing/marinade/whatever and go without thinking about the vessel later on:

• The beans went into the salted water to blanch for a couple minutes, then into an ice bath, then into their bowl with chopped dill and thin-sliced shallot. 

• The arugula/frisee/radish went into one bowl. 

• The carrots and turnips went into a bowl and got tossed with a white miso/evoo mixture. 

• The washed greens (that’s the beet tops, turnip tops, radish tops, and some heirloom collards I bought separately) went into one bowl and the chopped stems went into a second, along with sliced onion.

• Next I got the carrots and turnips onto a tray, ready to roast. I made sure they all started cut-side-up because I like the way the bit in contact with the pan gets a nice, contrast-y dark spot when you roast them that way. I set that tray aside for later.

• Next I spatchcocked the chickens, seasoned them, and got them onto their roasting sheet for later.

• Next I took the chicken backs and got them j to a saucepan with some carrots, onion, celery, herbs. I added a can of dry white wine (I bought a can and dumped the whole thing straight over the raw chicken backs—I have not been tempted by any alcohol in many months, but as an alcoholic it’s still better to be safe and not have a half bottle or can of wine sitting around while I cook). I let that wine fully reduce then added some store-bought zero-sodium chicken stock to cover and I left that on a very low simmer on a back burner until close to dinner time.

• Next I focused on the eggs. I coddled 4 for the salad and poached another 8 of them for the greens. I transferred all the eggs (both the poached and the boiled) into an ice bath to keep for later.

• Next I cut all the citrus (Cara Cara, grapefruit, and blood oranges) and drank half the juice (chef’s treat). 

• Next I made all the dressings. I like to make dressings and keep them in the bowls I’m going to toss the salads in so all I have to do later is add the ingredients and toss. 

• Simple Dijon lemon vinaigrette for the arugula and frisée

• Citrus/sherry vinegar/honey vinaigrette for the beets

• Soft boiled eggs/anchovies/dijon/lemon/evoo for the green beans

• Next I got the turnips and carrots roasting. I roasted them hot and with convection until tender and spotty brown. I took them out of the oven and transferred them to a bowl and set them aside at room temp for later. 

• I got the stems and onions into a sauté pan and sweated them with olive oil, then added a little stock to moisten and braise them until tender. I transferred them to a bowl and cleaned out the pan. 

• Meanwhile I tossted pepitas and hazelnuts until toasty and brown, then took them out of the oven, transfer to a tray to cool, and roughly crused the hazelnuts under the bottom of a pan. I set the nuts aside for later.

• By this point the beets were done and cool enough to handle, so I peeled them under running water (the peels run right off when you use the method from my book), and cut them into bite-sized pieces. I put the red beets and blood orange segments in one large bowl with half the beet dressing. I put the golden/chiogga beets, Cara Cara, and grapefruit segments in a second bowl and tossed them with the remaining dressing. (I keep the red beets and golden beets separate because otherwise they stain everything pink/red.) Beets taste better when they’re dressed warm and allowed to cool, but parsley doesn’t, so I added the picked and cleaned parsley leaves to the top of the golden beet bowl but did not toss/dress it yet.

• Next I pressed some white miso pasted through a really fine mesh to get it nice and smooth, and got it into a small skillet with lemon juice and a bit of water, whisked with a fork to get it really homogenous, and set it aside right in the pan. This would become the base for my miso beurre blanc later.

• Next I seasoned my sheep yogurt with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

2 hours before dinner:

At this point, everything was set so I did all the dishes I’d dirtied to this point and got my space re-organized so that I could relax/set everything aside until the final steps. I took some time off to go listen to some of the incredible music that was going on in the house.

90 minutes before dinner:

Final steps. This stage was really relaxed, just keeping a lazy eye on things that are roasting. These kinds of things I could do while I enjoyed more music and company.

• I put the potatoes in a hot convection oven to get them roasting, then put the chickens in about 15 minutes later.

• As the chickens roasted, I periodically tipped the fat from the pan drippings over the potatoes, and the watery liquid into the simmering stock/sauce

• When the chickens hit 140F in the breast (they were around 165F in the leg at this point) I took them out and let them rest until about 20 minutes before dinner. (They come up to around 145-150F during this rest. I try to never cook my chicken breast past 150F.)

• I flipped the potatoes and moved them around the pan to get them evenly roasted.

20 minutes before dinner:

• I got the chicken back into the oven at the hottest setting with convection to crust up and brown the skin for a few minutes, then pulled them out and got them into a cutting board to rest before carving. I divided the remaining drippings between the potatoes and stock. 

• I warmed the turnips and carrots in the hot oven for a few minutes then tossed them in a bowl with chopped parsley while I finished their sauce by emulsifying it with cultured French butter on the stovetop. I also emulsified some of that butter into the stock that had been reducing. 

• I quickly sautéed the leafy greens in olive oil to wilt, then added the stems.

• I used an electric tea kettle to make hot water and poured it over the poached eggs to reward them.

5 minutes before dinner:

• I spread the seasoned yogurt on the bottom of a big serving platter. I tossed the golden beets with the parsley. Then I plated by lathering the red beets, golden beets, and toasted nuts/seeds. I made a couple layers so that the beets are all mixed but the colors don’t red into each other. That went on the dinner table.

• I tossed the potatoes with some minced rosemary and thyme. That went on a platter on the dinner table.

• I tossed the green beans with their dressing and got them into a bowl. That went on the dinner table with a block of Parmesan and a microplane on the side.

• I got the greens onto a serving platter, topped it with the warm poached eggs, drizzled with the salsa macha (store-bought) and got that into the dinner table.

• I spread some of the miso beurre blanc onto the bottom of a serving platter, tossed the roasted carrots and turnips with some minced parsley and piled it on top, then drizzled with the rest of the beurre blanc and got it onto the dinner table.

• I tossed the arugula/frisée with its dressing and got it onto a big serving platter.

• I carved the chicken and put it on top of the salad.

• I whisked some Dijon mustard and fresh lemon juice into the chicken jus, then strained it all into a gravy pourer. I brought the chicken and its sauce to the table.

And that’s everything!  Note that the majority of prep (everything up to the final couple hours) is stuff that isn’t time sensitive and you could do even a day or two in advance (including the poached eggs and par-boiling the potatoes!). 

It’s a lot of stuff but if you keep organized and get everything ready to go, it should all be relaxed and groovy.

Finally, remember that the whole point of the food is to get folks to gather around the table and enjoy each other, so don’t worry too much about whether it comes out perfectly or not. If your guests are there and you’re having a good time, the food has already done its job before you’ve even started eating.

 Hope this helps!