Q. I want to give a drinks party for 200 friends. The alcohol is within my budget. Most of my friends are recovering alcoholics and the others are too old to binge drink, but I have been quoted £30 a head for food. I do not want to pay £6,000 for, effectively, a few kilos of trussed up ingredients in exotic sauces. Most people will be going out to dinner afterwards in any case. What is the solution, Mary? I do not want to seem mean.
N.S.C.C., London W14
A. Status canapés have become the norm at smart parties but your guests may well be grateful if you do not tempt them and add to their calorific intake. Satisfy their expectations instead by providing only the illusion that there is food at the party. Create this by having tall waiters push through the throng from time to time holding catering-sized trays above their heads containing only a litter of cocktail sticks and half-empty dips. Your friends will assume that there is food but that they personally have been serially standing in the wrong place at the wrong time to access it. Since most of them will be going out to dinner afterwards the failure to gorge will do them no harm. Less is the new more.
Q. Every year I take a house in Cornwall with a friend for the first week of the school holidays. We have to drive down all the bedding and all the necessary kitchen equipment and food to cater for about ten of us, to say nothing of our dogs and puppies. It would not be possible to do it by train but none of the teenagers coming has passed their driving test and, unfortunately, my friend and I have both been banned from driving.
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