BOY do we have leftovers.

[cjsmith]

Attrition was high on the morning of the party. This is partially due to the "people with small children" demographic intersecting with sniffles season; folks' kids would get sick and they'd let us know they wouldn't be coming. At least one guest sent regrets because he was not feeling well himself. Then there were the people who simply didn't come. We had twenty-eight, not forty.

We would have had way way way too much food even if we'd had forty. We're talking five TIMES too much food, here.

I estimate people ate:

About 1/8th of the fancy olives
About 1/20th of the hummus
Less than 1/8th of the jicama
Maybe 1/8th of the baby carrots
None of the celery sticks
About 1/8th of the provolone and the salami
Maybe 1/16th of the cheddar and the pepper jack
About 1/8th of the crackers
Most of the chocolate chewy cookies with nuts
About 1/4 of the TJ's truffles
Maybe 1/8th of the gingersnaps
Maybe 1/4 of the butter cookies with sprinkles
None of the pfeffernuesse
About 1/3 of the contents of the crock pots
About 1/2 of the rolled-up lavosh sandwiches
1/12th of the sodas
1/6th of the beer
Most of the fruit juice
All of the wine (except they brought some, so I do have a few bottles now)

I bet a lot of this was due to the layout of the food vs. chairs, the fact that the party wasn't very formal (thus people were wearing clothing that was comfortable to sit down in), and the fact that everyone there had a big interest in common. Eventually everyone sat in big groups, some folks in chairs and some on the floor, and had lively conversations. People didn't get up to go fetch food.

Next time: less food, food closer to where people will sit down, and buy more wine. :)

Comments

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Statistics from the party:

28 people (including us)
0.7 wine glasses/person
0.33 bottles of wine/person (mainly reds)
0.07 cracker boxes/person
0.035 cheese+meat plates/person
0.035 crock pots/person
0.035 hummus dips/person
1.2 sodas+water/person (Coke, 7-Up, Diet Coke, Kern's, root beer are all good, Diet 7-Up and beer is bad)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

How are you counting those cheese+meat plates? Let's count a set of two plates as one "unit", because there were different things on the plates.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

I'm counting a plate as having all 4 types of cheese/meat on them. So if you had 28 people and 2 plates with 2 types of food each, people would eat half of each plate.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

OK, cool. So 0.035 cheese+meat "units" per person.

Each cheese+meat "unit" had a pound of meat, and the meat went twice as fast as the cheese, so they ate 0.07 pounds of meat per person. I haven't yet figured out how many pounds of cheese were in each "unit", but I do know the cheese consumption was largely provolone.