Feeding a Crowd

I was talking to my neighbor today and she said "you sure had a lot of people at your house a couple weeks ago--how did you feed them all?"  She probably thought we spent a fortune feeding so many people based on grocery store prices these days but we used a lot of tricks we learned in the past when we hosted large parties or fed large groups of people on the cheap (years ago at my non profit we fed lots of families with a super bare-bones budget but everyone always went away full!).  Here's how we did it...

• I made ALOT of snacks.  Brownies, cookies, cakes, caramel popcorn...these are easy ways to create a lot of food for cheap.  If you buy a dozen brownies at the store it costs a shocking amount of money but a box mix makes a couple dozen brownies for a couple dollars.
• We bought $5 chickens from Sam's Club and this was the main course for one of the days.  
• Speaking of Sam's Club, we also bought 5 dozen eggs, six heads of romaine lettuce, two pounds of sliced cheese, and two pounds of sliced turkey for sandwiches.  Also we bought several cases of bottled water which everyone drank or took with them when they went to the tourist areas (this is cheaper than buying water in the high-priced stores near the tourist areas).
• I made a big salad each day to go with the main meal, basically romaine lettuce with some tomatoes and cucumbers from the 99 Cent Store.
• I made a huge batch of pancakes one day (a giant bag of pancake mix at Sam's Club costs less than $10 and literally makes hundreds of pancakes).  Leftovers were wrapped up and put in the fridge and then disappeared overnight.
• We bought lots of loss leader snacks at our local grocery store over the past few months and saved them for the kids to eat when they were hungry.  At the store we bought boxes of granola bars for 99 cents on sale, boxes of cereal for the same price, bananas (always cheap), and bags of potato/corn chips for $1.50 each (we usually have to buy three bags at a time to get the sale price but rarely eat these so they go in the snack box for parties).
• We made lots of Filipino dishes which uses a base of rice or noodles then hubby makes a simple stew of chicken/pork/beef (bought at 99 cents a pound then kept in the freezer until we have a large meal to make).  We also made fried rice, stir-fried noodles, etc which uses a cheap base and lots of finely sliced vegetables and meat (way cheaper than giving each person a slab of steak!).
• We had bought racks of pork ribs for $97 cents a pound and again, put them in the freezer until hubby made three racks of baked ribs for the main course one night.
• We encouraged the kids to make sandwiches to take with them instead of paying Strip prices when they got hungry while out and about (bread was bought at the 99 Cent Store for $1.50 a loaf, cheese and sliced turkey was bought at Sam's Club).
• A few jars of spaghetti sauce, a couple of cans of canned tomatoes and some spices made a lot of pasta sauce.  Add in some frozen meatballs we made a while back and a few $1 packages of spaghetti noodles, plus a salad, and a loaf of bread heated up in the oven and we had a complete meal for everyone for less than $20.
• I cooked so many eggs!  Fried eggs, scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs...everyone ate eggs for breakfast.
• Sides included frozen vegetables like bags of corn (99 cents a pound), mashed potatoes ($1.50 for a 5 pound bag of potatoes on sale), fresh green beans that were on sale, etc.
• We stocked up on soda when it was on sale over the past several months so there was plenty of that for everyone who didn't want water.
• A few other tried-and-true ways to feed a crowd that we didn't get to this time: chili is super easy to make, as is cornbread, and feeds a lot of people for cheap as does a big chicken Caesar salad and bread for a light lunch.  A taco/burrito bar is also a good way to stretch a lot of food for a little money.  Baked potatoes with chili is another good meal for a crowd.

Overall, besides the one day we took everyone to the Chinese buffet for lunch, we cooked A LOT of food.  However this was much cheaper than taking more than a dozen people out to eat for every meal and really didn't take a lot of time make (washing the dishes was another story though...).