Throwing a really great party doesn’t have to be difficult if you do two important things:

• Plan ahead a bit.
• Create a menu that combines a healthy selection of make-ahead recipes with a few choice “serve immediately” dishes. The make-ahead dishes are the backbone of the party and the more time sensitive dishes add a sense of fresh and just made to the whole affair.

To make party planning and cooking easier, I have a whole arsenal of make-ahead recipes in my collection and am always on the hunt for new additions. And just because a dish can be made ahead doesn’t mean it can’t showcase really great ingredients or have a unique flavor profile. Make ahead does not have to equal boring!

For my upcoming pumpkin carving party, 10 of the 21 different dishes I plan to serve can be (and have been) made more than a week in advance. And really, with travel for fun and work filling up the days before the party, I didn’t have a choice. Even if I choose not to sleep for 24 hours before the party, I won’t be able to pull of such an extensive menu without the help of my make-ahead recipes.

Disclaimer: Really, 21 dishes is probably overkill for a pumpkin carving party, but hey, I like to cook. Also, some of these dishes are simple things like a cheese plate and dippers for fondue, so it’s not 21 complex dishes. Mixing easy and more difficult preparations is another key to throwing a really great party. But, I digress…

Three of my favorite types of make-ahead party foods include:

• Flavored nuts. While you could easily set out a dish of mixed nuts for your guests, in an hour or so you can jazz up any plain ol’ nut to make it just a little more special. Most seasoned nut recipes keep for a week or two at least, and most are also easy to prepare. At this year’s party I’m serving Rosemary Roasted Almonds and Orange Chipotle Spiced Pecans. I made both recipes last night between dinner time and bed time. With just a few ingredients, the prep work goes quickly and the oven does most of the heavy lifting. Nuts like these also make great holiday gifts. They are homemade, which everyone truly appreciates, but they fit neatly into a hectic schedule.
• Biscotti. I have extolled the virtues of biscotti in previous posts. They are surprisingly easy to make, can be both savory and sweet, work with almost limitless flavor combinations, and freeze beautifully. For this year’s party I’ve made a Parmesan and Black Pepper Biscotti, a Gourmet recipe that turned out to be my tribute to that great magazine. With only a few ingredients, the parmesan is the star, with the black pepper adding a contrasting bite at the back of the throat after each nibble. They go very well with champagne too, which is always a bonus in my book. I made the dough for this recipe in my food processor because I really hate cutting butter into flour by hand, and it worked beautifully. The biscotti will keep for up to four weeks wrapped tightly in foil and then zipped up in a freezer bag. Let them thaw the night before you plan to serve them. And if you don’t have parmesan on hand, try another hard cheese like an asiago or even a well-aged manchego.
• Nuts and Bolts. My family calls Chex Mix “Nuts and Bolts” although I’m not really sure why. It’s a much more fun name though so I’ll go with it. While you can buy Chex Mix pre-made, I’d highly recommend that you make it yourself because you can control the salt content and the quality of all of the ingredients. It’s also silly easy. If you’ve only ever had packaged Chex Mix, I highly recommend you try a homemade version – the difference is astronomical. Like all of my other favorite recipes, the Nuts and Bolts recipe is infinitely variable. Change up the cereal combinations, the nuts and other mix-ins, as well as the spices you use for flavor. Like seasoned nuts, putting the dish together is easy and the oven does the hard work. These munchies keep for 3-4 weeks in an air-tight container and are perfect to keep on hand during the holidays for when unexpected guests drop by. My recipe is my take on the one my mother has been making since I was a kid.

Recipe: Savory Chex Mix with Pumpkin Seeds

Details

• Difficulty: Easy
• Serves: 36-40 1 cup servings
• Prep Time: 15 minutes
• Cook Time: 60 minutes

Ingredients

• ½ c. olive oil
• 2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 2 Tbsp. Balsamic vinegar
• 1 tsp. red hot pepper sauce
• 1 box each Rice Chex, Corn Chex, and Wheat Chex
• 8 oz. pretzels, any shape
• 6 oz. pecan halves
• 4 oz. roasted, shelled pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
• 1 1 oz. package Italian salad dressing mix
• ¼ tsp. garlic powder

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.
2. Combine the olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, and hot pepper sauce in a small bowl and whisk to mix well.
3. Add the cereal, pretzels, pecan halves, and pumpkin seeds in a large roasting pan and stir to combine.
4. Combine the salad dressing mix and the garlic powder in a small bowl and stir to mix.
5. Sprinkle the dry seasonings over the top of the cereal, pretzel, and nut mixture. Drizzle evenly with the olive oil mixture. Do not stir.
6. Place the roaster in the oven. Bake, stirring every 15 minutes, for 1 hour.
7. Remove from oven and let cool completely before storing in an air-tight container.

Recipe for Success

• My local market has tamari roasted pumpkin seeds in the bulk department and they work beautifully in this dish. You can include unshelled, roasted pumpkin seeds in the mix instead of shelled seeds, but they do make add a shelling component to the munching, so be sure to put out a shell receptacle.
• My family owned a house with a whole slew of pecan trees for most of my childhood, so pecans tend to be our nut of choice. You can however use any nut, or combination thereof, that you like. Buy roasted or raw nuts – which ever you would normally buy for snacking.
• We use standard Chex cereal in our recipe, but you could easily use another similar cereal if you’d like. Experiment!
• If you’d like to add a bit of a sweet element to the mix, you could toss in dried fruit or even M&Ms. Add them at the end after the mixture has cooled.

I think I like biscotti because they are the perfect non-cookie bakedgood for the non-baker. They are very forgiving: an extra 30 seconds or a minute mixing here or there won’t destroy the texture. The dough is easy to work with and doesn’t require trips to and from the fridge before baking.

Biscotti are also almost infinitely variable. Once you have a basic recipe down you can create variation after variation on the biscotti theme. And finally, biscotti keep well. Store them in an airtight container at room temperature for two weeks or so, or wrapped in foil and then slipped in plastic bags in the freezer for a month. Because they are so easy and flexible, biscotti are a great addition to any gathering menu and you’ll find them on almost all of mine.

For this Valentine’s Day, I’ve tweaked my standard Double-Chocolate Biscotti with Almonds recipe in two ways:

1. I’ve added cherries because, well, what’s better than chocolate and cherries?
2. I’ve doubled the recipe to make enough for two small offices and one fourth grade classroom.

In a previous post I discussed how I’d modified a really great recipe from The Kitchen Sink to create my perfect chocolate biscotti. What follows now is my officially tweaked recipe especially designed to feed a whole slew of people. When you’re ready to make the biscotti yourself, keep the following in mind:

• This recipe bakes a bunch o’ biscotti. My heavy-duty Kitchen Aid mixer barely manages to get the mix-ins into the stiff dough. If you are making this with a hand-held mixer or in a small mixer, consider making two separate batches that use exactly half of the ingredients for each batch.
• Speaking of smaller batches, if you don’t really need to feed two offices and a bunch of fourth graders, you can cut this recipe in half and make about 30 or so biscotti.
• The chocolate chip, cherry, and almond mix-ins total 3 ½ cups of goodness. Feel free to tweak the ratios of these ingredients or only use two of the three. You can also substitute another dried fruit like cranberries or blueberries for the cherries and the nut of your choice for the almonds.

Recipe: Double-Chocolate Biscotti with Cherries and Almonds

Details

• Difficulty: Medium
• Makes: 52-64
• Prep Time: 60 min
• Cook Time: 60 min

Ingredients

• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 Tbsp. instant espresso powder
• 12 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 tsp. cherry extract
• 1 cup slivered almonds, roughly chopped
• 1 cup dried cherries
• 1 1/2 cups bittersweet chocolate chips, roughly chopped.

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. Butter and flour two large baking sheets or line with silpats.
3. Whisk together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt, and espresso powder in a large bowl.
4. In an electric mixer beat together butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes. Add eggs, vanilla, and cherry extract. Beat until well combined.
5. Incorporate the flour mixture on cup at a time to form a stiff dough.
6. Turn the mixer on the lowest setting and add the almonds, cherries, and chocolate chips. Mix just until combined.
7. Turn the dough out onto wax paper on the counter and divide into four equal parts.
8. Flour your hands work directly on one of the prepared baking sheets. Form two sections of dough into two slightly flattened logs, each about 12 inches long and 2 inches wide.
   
9. Repeat with the other two logs on the second prepared baking sheet.
10. Bake logs for 35 minutes, or until slightly firm to the touch.
    
11. Cool biscotti logs on the baking sheets for 5 minutes and then transfer to a cutting board.
12. Cut biscotti logs diagonally into 3/4-inch slices.
    
13. Remove silpats from baking sheets (if using) and stand individual biscotti slices on their bottoms on sheets. The biscotti from two logs should fit on one baking sheet.
14. Return the baking sheets to the oven and bake biscotti until crisp, about 5-10 minutes. Remove sheets from oven and let biscotti sit on baking sheets for about 5 minutes.
15. Transfer biscotti to a rack and cool completely.

The biscotti will keep in airtight containers for 1-2 weeks and frozen up to 1 month.

Biscotti falls into a variety of categories for me: techniques that are easier than I thought they were, types of foods I don’t make enough, tabula rasa foods, and great food gifts. The basic biscotti recipe is very simple, can be sweet or savory, and contain almost endless combinations of your favorite ingredients. Even better, biscotti are often an expensive extra in coffee shops and bakeries, which makes them more appreciated when they are home made. When I came across The Kitchen Sink’s recipe for Double Chocolate-Almond Biscotti I was immediately inspired to revisit my old friend biscotti. I really like Kristin’s take on Gourmet’s recipe. I also made a few of modifications of my own:

• Add 1 ½ tsp. instant espresso powder to make the chocolate flavor just a little more intense. You can’t taste the coffee at all but it makes the chocolate, well, more chocolaty. This addition of a bit of extra dry ingredient didn’t seem to affect the overall ratio of dry to wet ingredients.
• Add 1 tsp. vanilla. This is absolutely my grandmother’s hand at work. I just can’t make a baked good without vanilla. Much like the espresso I think it enhances the other flavors in the biscotti rather than standing out as its own flavor.
• Rough chop the chocolate chips. Kristin mentioned her chips were huge and mine were too. I thought it would b easier to cut the biscotti later if the chocolate pieces were a little smaller.
• Give the almonds a quick spin in my mini food processor. Almond slivers can be long so, as with the chips, I thought more smaller pieces might make cutter easier in the long run. This also led to good distribution of almonds throughout the biscotti.
• Cut the biscotti on the diagonal. This is purely for presentation’s sake, but I think it makes for a pretty cookie.
• Place the biscotti on their bottoms instead of on a cut side for the second baking. I learned this technique in a cooking class a couple of years ago. The chef said it promotes even baking the second time around. I’ve seen all sorts of variations on how you cook the biscotti the second time around so I think this is ultimately a personal preference.
• Cook the biscotti for only 5 minutes on the second baking. I like my biscotti a little softer than most, so I limited my second cook time to 5 minutes but left the biscotti on the hot pan on the counter for 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack. Even if you like your biscotti extra-crispy, keep an eye on them during the second baking; the almonds can burn if the biscotti are in the oven too long.

I’ll be sharing these with my co-workers to jump-start their Monday morning.

A Weight Watchers™-Friendly Cookie

With my modifications, the biscotti are 3 points per piece. That’s not bad for a nice afternoon treat for the sweet tooth. Keep in mind that I make my biscotti fairly long and thick so I only got 26 out of this whole recipe. To create 2 point biscotti cut the logs into 16 pieces each for a total of 32.