Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Party Food

It's always party season! You can have a party for any reason at all. In order to make your party great you need to have great food. However, how much do you need? There are some good rules of thumb you can use when you are estimating how much food you will need for your party.

Are you going to do a sit down dinner or just provide appetizers? This will make a difference in your calculations. If you are planning a full-blown meal, figure that you will need about a pound and a half of food per person. If you are doing appetizers, you will need about one pound per person. Of course, you may need to adjust this a bit, if you know your friends and family are big eaters.

For appetizers, the average guest tends to eat 5 pieces per hour for the first two hours of a party and three per hour for each hour longer that the party lasts. Following this average, you would need about 130 appetizers for a group of ten people hanging out for three hours. If you are also planning a meal, you can cut back on the appetizers a bit.

If you are planning to make fondue, which is again gaining in popularity, you can figure that a single person can eat about 20 1-inch cubes of bread. This is about half of a standard loaf of French bread. One person would also consume about 6 to 8 ounces of meat, 4 to 6 ounces of cheese, 6 ounces of seafood, 6 to 8 ounces of veggies or fruit, or 4 cookies. It is better to prepare too much than not have enough to feed your guests.

You can figure that one gallon of punch will give ten people three 4-ounce servings. If you know your guests will drink more than this, prepare more. If you are planning on serving alcoholic beverages, consider that most guests will drink two per hour for the first couple of hours and then one per hour after that. Stock up accordingly, including mixers, wine, or beer, depending on what you plan to serve.

Many people like ice in their drinks. If you are providing iced drinks, consider that you will need about 1 pound of ice per person. If your party is taking place in hot weather, you will need to take this into consideration and provide even more ice. Stock up on cocktail napkins to accompany appetizers or provide small paper plates to cut down on the number of napkins needed.

You will want to plan on at least a couple of easy party appetizers to start off any party. Your guests will enjoy having some light snacks even if you are planning a meal. You can make many appetizers ahead of time so you are not too rushed. Planning your party should begin several weeks in advance and preparation can begin earlier in the week.

If you are hosting an impromptu party, be sure to keep the ingredients for a few easy recipes on hand so you can quickly throw them together. This means that your guests will not arrive to an empty table.

Everyone loves shrimp appetizers. The real beauty of shrimp is that it is appealing, the color is attractive and you can do so many things with them. You can be elaborate and make bacon wrapped shrimp or you can keep it simple and serve cooked shrimp with cocktail sauce.