Party Planning - Who is this all for?

Who is the party for is another question you should always ask when planning an event. Sometimes the answer to this question is totally obvious -- for instance, if you are helping someone celebrate a 16^th birthday, graduation, wedding, what have you -- but sometimes its not quite as clear-cut. Still, figuring this  out is invaluable in guiding the decisions that follow. 

For instance, if you want to throw a dinner party to have some long, relaxed conversations with good friends over a laid-back meal, then you are not going to want cooking the dinner to take over so you spend all evening in the kitchen working on the next course while everyone else talks and eats.  If you’re throwing a party for the heck of it – face it, while part of your intent is no doubt to show your close friends a really good time, at some level a party for its own sake is really a party for your sake, right? -- so you’ll need to make sure you’ll have a good time at it too.

If, on the other hand, the party is to host a work group, that’s probably a different set of parameters – it becomes less important you have a good time, and perhaps more important you put on a good show that helps you and others build networks, and impresses the right people. 

If you are throwing a birthday party or shower – its not about you at all (unless you're hosting your own!), its all about your guest of honor, so their desires take precedence over what you might personally choose if you were just throwing a house party – within reason, of course.

Enough said here – the point is that every party is for someone, whether its explicitly stated or not, and to be successful you need to keep that someone foremost in mind when you are putting it all together. You’d be surprised how often the whole point of a gathering gets lost in the details, or in petty contests of wills … but then again, who hasn’t been to a wedding like that?

Enough theory. Our Blue Hawaii tiki party progresses slowly but steadily; its about 3 months away, but its not too early for making and filling grocery lists of non-perishable items -- the long lead time not only ensures less frenzy as the party gets closer to term, and spreads the expense out more, so there isn't as big a hit to the pocketbook a week or two before the event. And, the fact that a longer lead time allows you to take advantage of more sales when making party purchases helps keeps those costs down too.

And ... the longer lead time created by early planning also gives you time to find hard-to-obtain supplies, which for tiki drink ingredients is frequently key. For instance, given our Elvis-meets-Hawaii theme for this, we want to include a drink called a Coconut Willie (Beachbum Berry's Intoxica, page 29), as it was originally served in the Lagoon Cocktail Terrace at the Coco Palms resort hotel, where Elvis filmed the famous wedding scene in Blue Hawaii. The problem - the drink includes an old-time ingredient called Coconut Snow Powder, that is available just about nowhere. 

As luck would have it, I found it by sheer chance in the Dalles, Oregon, after years (literally) of search some time back ...but if you're throwing a party, having just a can or so around the house may not cut it. The can says it was made by an outfit called Mele-Koi Farms, in California -- and after making a web search (and ignoring the 'Koi' hits involving fish) I find that the Mele-Koi outfit is closed. Beautiful. 

So now my options are clear. I can strike the drink, however theme-appropriate, from the menu, I can leave the drink on the menu with the full knowledge that my only supply of this rare substance may disappear, squandered on a single evening of revelry (my personal favorite), or ... I can try to reverse engineer it, since the label informs me it contains sugar, whey, coconut, nonfat milk, powdered egg whites, natural and artificial flavors, and a little salt. Hmmmm ... details, details.

Coconut Willie

1 tbsp coconut snow powder

1/2 oz Lopez coconut cream

1/4 oz Cointreau

2 1/2 oz gin

Blend for at least one full minute with 2 cups of crushed ice; pour into ceramic coconut mug (if you actually have the Coconut Snow Powder to make this, do be extravagant and order the mug! The Dynasty link on this blog should suffice, as would (for substantially more money) Trader Vic's online gift shop), and garnish with a marachino cherry and hunk of fresh coconut meat.