Ina Garten has hosted more dinners than most of us ever will. Her best advice is simple. Buy the cheesecake from a good bakery. Make the fresh raspberry sauce yourself, about 10 minutes of work, and sit down. “You’re relaxed. The dessert is delicious. Everybody has a good time.”
That’s from the Journal’s visit to her Manhattan kitchen this weekend, by Nora Knoepflmacher. Garten, 78, shared the shortcuts she uses herself. Her fix for last-minute guests is an emergency blue-cheese dip, her name for it. Blue cheese, mayonnaise and whatever vegetables are left in the crisper. Potato chips, olives and cucumbers go out as appetizers. A soft goat-and-sheep’s-milk cheese in oil gets puréed and spread on toast.
The star of the page is the eggs. Her ricotta scrambled eggs serve four and take 20 minutes. Twelve extra-large eggs, half a cup of whole milk, salt, pepper. Butter and olive oil in a 10-inch nonstick pan over medium-low heat. Let the eggs sit 30 seconds, then stir until they’re three-quarters done. Fold in half a cup of ricotta in dollops. Spoon onto buttered toast with chives, red pepper flakes and Parmesan. “It’s like a custard rather than scrambled eggs,” she says. Any herb works.
Spend on one thing, make the rest
Notice the pattern. The expensive-looking item is bought. The cheap part, the sauce, the dip, the eggs, is made by hand. And the gift she brings to someone else’s house is the same idea. Granola and a bag of coffee, or jam and a good loaf. Things people can use the next morning, when the party’s over and the budget is still there.
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This is cash flow (M5), and the holidays are the stress test. Hosting money has a way of leaving in small bites. A fancy dessert here, a cheese board there, a gift that gets regifted. Garten’s rule works because it picks. One bought item that looks like effort, then cheap, fast things that taste like effort. Twelve eggs and a tub of ricotta feed four people for less than one restaurant brunch. The 10-minute sauce turns a bakery cheesecake into yours. Nothing here touches a holding.
The thing in your plan this touches is the holiday line in the cash-flow budget, the one that covers food, gifts and the people at your table. Most of us don’t have that line. We have a credit-card statement in January. One check this week. Write the number for the whole season now, hosting included, and decide which one thing you’ll buy ready-made and what you’ll make. If the number isn’t in the budget, that’s the review. You buy the umbrella in October, before the first storm of guests.