A couple of weeks ago, my good friends Liam and Alistair told me they were making a short film, and if I would be so kind as to cater for their shoot. Never one to say no to feeding large groups of people, I said yes. It was a 5-day shoot, with with 20 - 32 people on set each night. I had a budget of $100 a day, and had to make a proper meal, a set of nibbly snacks and some sweets. At first, I had big plans of making almost everything from scratch - from pasta sauces, to cakes, quiches and pies.

However!

Disaster struck. One week before the shoot was scheduled to begin, I swiftly (and painfully) threw out my back at the gym, and was bedridden for two days. After that, I slowly got better, but I still couldn't go to work or uni for the rest of the week, and couldn't face the idea of standing in the kitchen for hours on end. I scaled back my cooking plans, for instance, buying jarred sauce and dips from the supermarket instead of making everything myself. For the items that I did make, some were from recipes, and some I just improvised (see below). I enlisted the help of my best friend (thank-you!!) and we still managed to feed the crew.

On an aside - hitting Coles with $500 and a trolley is waay too much fun!

Here is what we ended up making...


Day 1 - 21 people

Penne Bolognese (Beef mince, Coles 'Smart Buy' penne, Dolmio tomato sauce)

Vegetarian Pasta (Dolmio tomato sauce, mushrooms, Coles 'Smart Buy" spiral pasta)

Coca Cola Cupcakes (Nigella Lawson, How to be a Domestic Goddess. I used baking powder instead of bicarb, which made them dense and fudgy. I also used less coke in the icing than the recipe states, so the icing was thicker than usual.)

Anzac Biscuits (Belinda Jeffrey, Mix and Bake. Pictured at the top. It was a very good recipe! Anzacs are highly addictive.)

Dips & Crackers & Bread & Cheeses. And a melon!

Day 2 - 20 people
2 Ham & Cheese quiches (Donna Hay, Modern Classics I. I made the pastry very quickly, and ended up with a couple of holes in the base. Whoops! In order to avert this problem, I layed whole pieces of ham across the base, rather than chopping it up. Brilliant!

Layer over the ham...

Sprinkle over cheese and chopped parsley...

Pour over a mixture of cream, eggs and mustard...

And bake!

Cheese/spinach/potato pastries. This is the way my mum makes curry puffs. You just make a filling (in this case, boiled potato cubes, chopped cooked spinach and grated cheese). Then, you heat up your old electric jaffle iron, line it with pastry and fill it with your filling. The jaffle iron shapes and cooks the pastry all in one go. My mum is a genius.

Mmm... Pastry town!

Chocolate & Pecan higgledy piggeldys (Belinda Jeffry's Mix and Bake. To make these you crush up McVitie's digestive biscuits, mix them with butter and sugar, press them into a large tray, and bake for 5 minutes. Then you pour over finely chopped chocolate (which melts), sprinkle over chopped pecans, and let it set. Crunchy and compulsive.

Cheese stars (Nigella Lawson, How to Eat. Made on special request for Alistair. His favourite biscuits. Apparently he was scavenging through the food boxes every night, waiting for these to appear.)

Dips & Crackers & Crudités & Fruits


Day 3 - 20 people

Baguettes! We got 6 large baguettes from Laurent, sliced them in half lengthwise, and filled them with all sorts of things - ham, cheese & mustard; chicken, mayo & salad; mixed roasted veggies & feta; salami, tomato & cheese... We got 6 good-sized sandwiches out of each large baguette, and apparently there was enough to even feed the 30 extras.

More dips, crackers, fruits, crudites and cheese

Little sandwiches ready for the jaffle iron. Liam cleverly invested in his own jaffle machine for the film shoot. This worked out well, because some of the bread we'd bought (4 days earlier) had started to go a little bit stale. (It was still well within its use-by date, but was just starting to dry out). I used that bread for ready-made jaffles, and the bread was saved. There was ham and cheese, plain cheese, and pesto & feta.

Day 4 - 21 people

The same pastas as on Day 1

Leftover sweet treats from the previous days (Apparently I'd overcatered. Me?)

More dips, cheese, crackers etc etc...


Day 5 - 32 people

Baked pastas. For these I cooked pasta until just underdone, and then layered it in a foil tray with jarred pasta sauce and cheese, before baking them until brown and crispy. I made one vegetarian version, one salami version, and one with minced beef. These went down quite well, proving my theory that everything tastes better with cheese.

Again, there were also leftover sweets to go around, and yet another round of dips/cheese/crackers etc.

And after all of that, my back was fine (thank goodness), but I think another weekend stuck in bed was definitely in order.

Last week I went down to Main Ridge for two nights to help out with my friends' film shoot. They were shooting a pilot for a sketch comedy program, and they required a caterer (me).

I had a budget of $350 (we only spent $300 though, YAY). It was more difficult than expected, because I had to cook for 16 people, stay within budget, and attempt to make stuff that most people would find edible. And lots of the people up there weren't very adventurous. (There were people who didn't eat mushrooms, seafood, rice, pork, meat etc).

Here's what I made (mainly made at home, in advance and reheated up there).

Penne Alla Vodka
Chicken drumsticks with rice
Chilli Con Carne with bread rolls and cheese
Sausages, onions and bread

Breakfasts were just cereal, toast, milk, fruit and juice. And tea and coffee, of course. I also bought a couple of packets of Assorted Creams. With the leftover money, Lexi (director's girlfriend) went down to the supermarket and picked up loads of snack foods (Timtams, mint slices, chips, snakes, etc).

Oh my god I ate so so much crap. The food I made was high fat and carby enough as is, but combined with the snack food! Jaffe also brought up homemade brownies, with insanely huge choc chips (white, milk, dark). Mmmmmmm. Beautiful and addictive. (Did you know that you can make new brownies by smooshing together leftover brownie crumbs?!) Also I think I ate more than I usually do when I go up there because there just wasn't much to do! Usually when we go to Al's holiday house, we watch DVDs, eat drink talk and smoke all day (well, Al did still smoke a lot - he was very very stressed and was constantly smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee/energy drinks!) But, as most people were working on the filming, I had a lot of spare time in between cooking and cleaning.

I watched DVDs with Lexi, read Past Mortem (all of it in 1.5 days!) slept, watched the filming and ate crap! It was a really good experience overall though. I don't know if I'll ever do anything food-related that's professional, but you never know.

I'm very excited. I'm going to be catering for my friend's short film shoot in December. We're going up to Main Ridge for 2 nights - so there's 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 2 dinners and morning/afternoon teas. Last night I sat down with Alistair (director) and Lexi (make-up) and Daniel (best-boy) and I've set myself a budget of approximately $300. There's 14 of us. This is going to be fun. No alcohol on set, though.

So far we were thinking cereal and toast for breakfast; tea, coffee and biscuits for morning/arvo tea; sausage BBQ for lunch one day, sandwiches the next; and vegie lasagne for dinner one night and vegie pasta the next. Also an apple crumble and a chocolate self-saucing pudding for dessert. Just cos we can.