An Office Christmas Grazing Board for Twenty

Method

1. Clear the table properly. Laptops, cables, the phone in the middle, all of it off. A table with a monitor cable still snaking across it will not read as food.
2. Run butcher's paper down the centre, two arm spans wide, hanging over both ends. It is the surface, the platter and the clean-up in one, and nobody has to find twenty plates.
3. Take the cheese out of the fridge 45 minutes before you serve. Cold cheese tastes of almost nothing. Cut each kind differently so they read as four cheeses from across the room: wedge the hard ones, score the soft one and leave it whole, crumble the blue.
4. Put the bowls down first, spaced along the run, because everything else is arranged around them. Two of relish, two of olives, a teaspoon in each. Bowls first is what separates a board from a pile.
5. Place the cheeses between the bowls, well apart. People graze from both long sides of a boardroom table, so nothing should sit dead centre where only the tall can reach it.
6. Open half the crackers and fan them along both long edges, close to the cheese. Stand a few upright against a bowl for height. The other half stays sealed in the box under the table.
7. Fill the gaps with grapes in loose clusters, cherry tomatoes on the vine and cucumber batons. The fresh things break up an otherwise beige table, and they are what people reach for after their third cracker.
8. Build the sweet end into one corner. Fingers of fig and almond fruit paste next to the blue cheese, shortbread stacked beside it. Keeping the sugar in one place saves twenty people working out what goes with what.
9. Set the nuts in their own bowls at the far end with an allergy card in front of them, then put out the knives, one per cheese, and napkins at each end.
10. Reload once, about halfway through: the rest of the crackers, the rest of the nuts, more grapes. Ten seconds of work that doubles how long the board stays worth visiting.

What to buy in November and what to leave until December

Everything in the first four sections of the list is a November job. Crackers, nuts, relish, olives, fruit paste and shortbread keep in a cupboard for months, and buying them early takes the food off the December list entirely. We hand pack hampers out of the same shelf stable range in Corio, so it is the part of the board we know best: it travels, it stacks and it waits. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched from Geelong that day, and Australia Post carries it from there, so give a December order a clear run of days.

Cheese, grapes, tomatoes and cucumber are a two day job. Leftovers go back to being pantry items: sealed crackers into the office cupboard, relish and olives into the fridge for Monday's sandwiches, nuts into a jar beside the coffee.

Three questions about work Christmas party food

How much food per person for an office Christmas party?

For an afternoon graze rather than a meal, allow about 60g of cheese a head, a small handful of nuts, a packet of crackers between two or three people, and something to spoon for every four or five. For twenty that is roughly 1.2kg of cheese and nine packets of crackers. If the board is replacing lunch, add a third again and put out more fruit.

What food can you leave out at a work Christmas party?

Anything shelf stable: crackers, nuts, olives in jars, relish, fruit paste, shortbread, dried fruit. Hard cheese is fine for a few hours and will simply soften. What does not cope is chocolate, which goes dull and soft in a warm meeting room, anything with mayonnaise or cream, and seafood. Keep the sweet end to fruit paste and shortbread.

How do you cater a Christmas party for 20?

Buy the shelf stable food in one order weeks ahead, add cheese and fruit in the last two days, and build a single long run down the middle of the table rather than several small platters. One delivery to reception, one surface, one 40 minute build, and the leftovers are all things the office will happily eat in January.

If you would rather send the food than build it, the Gourmet Bites hamper packs the savoury half of this into one box, and our Christmas hampers scale the same idea up for a team. For volume orders, corporate gifting is where to start, and hampers ship free Australia-wide on orders over $100. For the home version of this board, with a bigger cheese budget and no warm meeting room, our Christmas grazing table guide covers the build in full.