Menu planning

Ordering food from catalogues guarantees a gourmet spread

You have just a few weeks until New Year's Eve and you've got to throw the party of the century. Don't despair. Even if your hosting skills are just barely above those of a Brazilian tree sloth, you can plan a successful menu for New Year's Eve. How? Think of the flurry of catalogues that pile up more reliably than snow this time of year. Once the province of JCPenny's outreach to rural towns -- Yes sir, I'd sure enough like to order me up a hunting vest -- catalogues have expanded beyond clothing to include just about everything imaginable, including food: simple or exotic, preserved or perishable. This means that if you order wisely, you can create a menu to please your friends and keep your three-toed tendencies a secret for another year.

How to order Dean & DeLuca (1-800-221-7714): camembert, $14; manchego, $25; duck and chicken liver mousse, $10; pâté forestier, $10. Rush order (two-day), $11; plus standard shipping, $9. Total: $79. Savannah's Candy Kitchen (1-800-443-7884): seven-story tower: divinity fudge, lemon cake, truffles, gophers, pralines, crabs, spiced nuts, chocolate almonds, assorted nuts, $59.95. Pecan pie, $19.95. Shipping (two-day), $20. Total: $99.90. Pemberton Orchards (1-800-551-7327): Vermont corncob-smoked boneless turkey breast, $44.95. Shipping, $9. Total: $53.95.

First, you need to figure out the basics: how many people and what kind of meal? It's possible to order the ingredients for a full sit-down dinner through the mail, but I wouldn't recommend it, for one major reason: freshness. Even if you get overnight delivery, what you order may already have sat on a loading dock for a day, and then -- if you aren't at home -- it will sit on your porch or in the back of a delivery truck for another day. Obviously, this matters less if you aren't ordering much perishable food, and since most people think of a New Year's party as less formal, you can work this to your advantage.

Recently, I tested out the catalogue method for what I'll call a "grazing menu" suitable for New Year's. A grazing menu is one that consists largely (if not entirely) of finger foods, simple snack items that can be carried on napkins or small plates. To make this work, you need to anchor the nibble-size bits with at least one relatively substantial entrée and a solid dessert. When planning my menu, I kept in mind both vegetarians and carnivores, and all shades in between: lactose-intolerant guests, white-meat-only people, chocolate lovers and avoiders. Also, I divided my menu evenly between savory items and sweet items. (At this kind of party, people tend to expect desserts to be available throughout the evening.)

There are other considerations in addition to food selection. Before assuming that anything you want is available on a whim, check out each company's shipping policies and availability statements. Williams-Sonoma, which offers a wide variety of goodies by catalogue, has disclaimers stating that it does not stock most prepared-food products in-house and thus can't guarantee delivery more quickly than within a week (with a suggestion that it could take two weeks for some items). If quick turnaround matters, such restrictions will doom you. You need, ideally, a place that can guarantee overnight or two-day delivery (and then you must be home to sign for the packages or post an explicit instruction, with your signature, for the delivery person). I ordered from three different suppliers so that if one order did not arrive when promised, I had backup food coming from other places. One of the companies was local, so I felt assured that that order, at least, would arrive on time.

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Celebrate like it's 1999
The guest list
Making your place spiffy in a jiffy

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My first order was for savory foods from Dean & DeLuca (1-800-221-7714), the upscale foodie heaven in New York City. The friendly and knowledgeable customer-service rep helped me pick out some cheeses and pâtés. We settled on a French camembert (a creamy cow's milk cheese) and a manchego (a wheel of sheep's milk cheese from Spain, suitable for the lactose-fearful). I ordered a pâté forestier, which blends pork and mushrooms, and -- for those who eat poultry but not pork -- a chicken and duck mousse. The food tab was $59, before $20 in shipping costs, leading to Great Catalogue Truth Number One: It's not about cost-effectiveness, it's about convenience and variety.

To round out the savory options, I ordered an eight-pound Vermont smoked boneless turkey breast ($44.95, plus $9 shipping) from Pemberton Orchards (1-800-551-7327) of Boston. This mammoth bird is precooked and ready to slice for a cold buffet or to heat up for a hot one. Its staggering size not only looks impressive, but also allows guests to pick at it all night, carving slabs for finger sandwiches or, after a few drinks, whacking off hunks to pop in their mouths like cheese.

I got all the sweets from one call to Savannah's Candy Kitchen (1-800-443-7884). Their seven-story "tower" is a dessert buffet unto itself. It comes with a glazed lemon cake as the centerpiece, plus gophers, pralines, and crabs (nutty confections with either chocolate or caramel); divinity fudge; and a box of truffles. The tower also includes chocolate-covered almonds, sugar-and-spice pecans, and assorted nuts. At $59.95, this seemed an incredible deal, and it did offer great grazing variety, but it also revealed Great Catalogue Truth Number Two: Objects may be smaller than they appear in the pictures. Although the tower's contents are generous and do fill up a table, the assorted nuts might barely fill an eight-ounce measuring cup, and the cake is a miniature. Fortunately, I had also ordered a Georgia pecan pie ($19.95), which is typical size and serves as a better main dessert than the baby cake. A rush shipping bill of $20 for this whole order brought the sweets tab to $100.

A few essentials for a grazing menu seem to fall outside the mail-order realm. Fresh crudités and several loaves of crusty French bread would round out the meal I ordered, but neither seemed especially suited to shipping. (We tried salad instead of crudités, but it didn't work as "in-hand" party food.) If you can't bear to make a single trip to Bread & Circus for those items, call Peapod (617-989-0854) or HomeRuns (1-800-882-7867) and have them deliver things right to your door. For alcohol, which I wouldn't order by mail for a number of reasons, ask your guests to bring some and -- trust me -- you'll end up with more than you could ever need.

I planned for this cornucopia to serve 8 to 10 guests, but once they arrived, I was anxious. The spread seemed impressive -- cheeses, pâté, mousse, smoked turkey, several kinds of nuts, cookies and candies, fudge, cake, and pie (as well as salad and bread) -- but would it be enough? In the end, the menu certainly held up (12 people actually grazed by), with only a few dessert options being exhausted. The Savannah goods were the most acclaimed: though small, the lemon cake was moist; though gooey, the pecan pie tasted perfect; the truffles, gophers, and chocolate almonds were gone by evening's end. (Only the divinity fudge -- a total sugar-shock oddity -- was a failure.) The cheeses were popular (we discovered it takes more than 12 people to finish off a three-pound wheel of manchego), and while the pâté was somewhat successful, the mousse was a clear miss. The turkey, served both cold and hot, was far more popular (and flavorful) when heated according to Pemberton's instructions; cold, it was fine but too reminiscent of a corporate party.

When all was said and done, it was like any party: some food items really wowed people and others became fodder for conversation. There were plenty of leftovers (even with one guest taking home the lemon cake and several others absconding with sweets), and -- this we loved -- cleanup was incredibly easy. It wasn't cheap -- nearly $250 -- but some might argue that time really is money. For sloths and time-deficient folks, this matters; with a phone in one hand and a catalogue in the other, now even they can approximate Martha Stewart Living. You can't put a price on that.

-- David Valdes Greenwood