How to stretch dinner for unexpected company

"Please stay--there's plenty!" The words are out of our mouths before we know. Make "plenty" come true with a few quick tricks and a little advance-planning for next time! You wouldn't have invited unexpected company unless you'd figured out how to manage the main course--let's work on the rest.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• the basics of dinner
• biscuit mix, muffin mix or bread
• canned, frozen or fresh vegetables
• brownie- or bar-cookie mix, or slice-and-bake cookie dough
• a little determination!

1. What follows are not steps to be done in order, but rather choices to extend your meal, in order of ease and convenience.
   
   Make an extra vegetable. Just having more than one on the plate makes dinner look more festive and generous.

2. Add to the salad and serve it first. A plain green salad welcomes fruit, nuts, canned chick-peas, beets, water-chestnuts, or kernel corn. If you have no tomato, cut up apple, orange, or other fresh fruit.
   
   Serving salad first is an old restaurant trick--keeps you from being so hungry when the main course arrives.

3. Bake something--or a couple of somethings--fast and easy: drop biscuits and corn muffins are fast. Keep the oven on for a warm dessert--brownies, baked apples (quarter the apples to speed cooking, sprinkle with remaining ingredients), halved bananas with dots of butter and a little brown sugar or maple syrup.

4. Relax--an impromptu invitation is just that, and no one expects perfection. Add a bit to the meal, and reserve your main energy for enjoying your unexpected company; that's why you invited them and why they said yes.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember some of the old-fashioned "go-withs" your mother or grandma put on the table. Applesauce, coleslaw, and warm potato salad with pork or ham, jelly as well as butter with the biscuits or muffins. Pickles with almost anything. Fruit salad the same. Many of the little extras disappeared as moms got busier and calories took on greater meaning; put them back when you need to stretch.
• Sharing a meal, even at the last minute, strengthens new friendships, especially for kids, so be prepared for the next time. As we become more and more rushed, there's a chance that your impulsive invitations count for more than you imagine.