Cooking for a Crowd

Over the past two weeks I have been cooking and baking for a series of dinners with lots of guests. I am not doing this alone--my spouse is doing all the meat for the three gatherings, and I have various firends helping with appetizers and desserts. It has been five years since I have put on dinners that have over a hundred guests, and there are several things that I had forgotten that are now quite clear. The first is that the quantity of food is really startling. We baked 37 cakes and over a 1000 miniatures for the desserts. We did a shopping list ahead of time, had a pdf of the recipes we would be baking, and over the 6 days there were 18 trips to the grocery store. Then there is the ignominy of going through the checkout line with 17 quarts of heavy cream, 50 pounds of sugar, 23 pounds of butter and 20 dozen eggs....and a cardiology consult please... Then there is the relative lack of guidance on quantity of food, given the variety of what is being made. We have vegans, we have gluten allergies, and we have vegetarians--what if everyone eats the vegan food and there is none left for the vegans? Do we get them to the head of the line and tell them to load up on food or forever hold their tongues? Or do we have enough so that everyone could fill up on it? Or should the food just be vegan? Decisions, decisions. I am sure that if I were a caterer, or a student in a culinary institute, I would just look this up in one of my myriad of references texts, but instead I am just making a large amount of food, and if it runs out, or if people actually go hungry, I will do better next time.