Several years ago I was a partner in a catering company in Northern California, Silver Sage Caterers. Silver Sage is still a thriving enterprise run by my good friend, Greg Cornell. Our bread and butter business was catering banquets for sporting groups like Ducks Unlimited, California Waterfowl Association and Safari Club International. Oh sure, we did weddings and other formal affairs, but I got to the point where I couldn’t talk to another mother about the color of their tablecloths (“I ordered aqua and this is obviously not aqua”), so we stuck to the people we were most comfortable with.

One of the things we learned early on was that, no matter how much food you bring, these guys will eventually eat it all. Never run out of food. As with any catered event, running out of food is never a good thing. We did get scared a couple of times, but everybody got fed. I still have to attend a few functions every year and I’m frequently annoyed when they run out of food, particularly cheap food. Now, in all fairness to the caterers, sometimes their clients underestimate how many people are going to show up for an event. You can’t expect a caterer to bring a whole mess of extra food, just in case the guest estimate was too low. On the other hand, loading your guests up on inexpensive eats like bread, potatoes, rice and beans is cheap insurance. Whether you’ve got 3 couples coming over for dinner tonight or 300 duck hunters coming to your local DU dinner make sure there’s plenty of bread!


Silver Sage Caterers is no stranger to garlic, lots of garlic. We’d easily blow through 25 pounds of peeled garlic cloves every week. Caesar dressing, tri-tip rub and roasted garlic mashed potatoes (my personal favorite), all garlic heavy and delicious, but while garlic is good, there are a couple of drawbacks associated with both cooking with it and eating with it. First off, your breath smells bad. Next, if you handle raw garlic for a few hours you’re gonna end up smelling with some stink on you. After a long day of catering, the garlic aroma would come through my pores for about 8 hours. You can imagine how my wife would want to snuggle up with a guy who smelled like garlic bread. Come to papa.

There are several claims about the various health benefits of garlic, but that’s not why I eat it. Stink aside, I like the way it tastes and I’m still married to the same woman after 25 years so apparently she’s gotten over the smell. If you want to minimize the hot edge of raw garlic, try roasting it as is illustrated in this week’s video.

Regarding the Silver Sage Caterer’s roasted garlic mashed potatoes, here’s what to do. Smash boiled potatoes with whole roasted garlic cloves, chopped fresh rosemary, sour cream, milk, butter, salt and pepper. Here’s a tip: if it turns out that your mashed potatoes are a little runny and thin, you can tighten them up with some instant mashed potato flakes. Just stir the potato flakes into the hot mixture until it’s almost to the desired thickness. After a minute or two it will thicken up a bit more so don’t go overboard with the flakes.