★★★★A buyer
Useful. I had already worked out most of my menu so I used it more as a checking tool, and it did catch one dish I had forgotten had butter in it.
The Mixed-Diet Christmas Table
It earns its place when two or more people at the table avoid different things, when you are cooking ten dishes or more, and when at least one of those restrictions is an allergy.
$9
- Excel and Google Sheets both open it — .xlsx included
- Nothing to install, nothing to subscribe to
- Opens on your phone
- Instant download after payment
- 14-day refund, no questions
A menu that looks generous usually is not, once you count it per person. This checks every dish against every guest and tells you how many each of them can actually eat — course by course, before you shop.
It is never the whole meal. It is one course
You count the dishes, not the dishes per person, and thirteen sounds like plenty. Then the sprouts are buttered, the potatoes are done in goose fat, the pastry is made with butter and the bread sauce is both — four dishes that read as vegetables and are not. The failure is rarely the whole dinner. It is one course, usually pudding, where one person has nothing at all, and finds out at the table in front of everybody. Nobody notices in advance because nobody does that arithmetic in their head for eight guests. It is not difficult arithmetic. It is just sixty-five small checks that have to happen before you shop rather than after.
Three things it works out for you
Every guest against every dish, totalled for the meal and again for each course. One number per person, which is the number nobody ever has. A zero in a course column turns the whole row pink. That is the only thing on the sheet worth changing a menu over, and it is usually fixable by subtraction. The column people skip. A choice needs a dish they can eat. An allergy needs a clean pan and somebody serving who knows what is in the stuffing.
The fix is almost always subtraction
A dish with butter in it fails for everyone avoiding dairy, in every course it appears in. Swap the goose fat in the potatoes for oil and the butter pastry on the pie for oil pastry, and the vegan gains two dishes and stops having an empty main — and you have cooked nothing extra. Adding a separate vegan main gains one person one dish and costs you an afternoon. The sheet does not tell you which to do, but it shows you the trade in numbers rather than in guesswork. Each dish also gets a label written for it — Vegan, Vegetarian, GF, Nut-free — built from what you typed. Change the pastry and the card in front of the pie changes too.
What's inside
- Start Here
- The order to do things in, and one honest paragraph about why allergy and choice are not the same question.
- Setup
- The meal, the day, the time, what you call your four courses, and the number of dishes below which you want warning.
- Guests
- Up to 20 people. Five things they might avoid, whether it is an allergy or a choice, and a note for the thing you always forget.
- Dishes
- Up to 30 dishes. Course, who is making it, what is actually in it, and a table label — Vegan, Vegetarian, GF, Nut-free — written for you.
- The Table
- Every guest against every dish. Dishes they can eat, broken down by course, with pink rows where a course is empty for somebody.
- Serving Cards
- A label and a cannot-eat-it count for each dish, and a line for each guest with what they are avoiding. Prints on one page.
How it works
- 1PayCard only. No account, no password, no address. Two fields and a payment box.
- 2DownloadThe link appears on screen straight away and lands in your inbox at the same time. It does not expire.
- 3Open itDouble-click for Excel, or File → Import → Replace spreadsheet for Google Sheets. Every formula carries over.
Specifications
- Formats
- Excel (.xlsx), Google Sheets (.xlsx) and a printable PDF guide
- Tabs
- 6
- Works in
- Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, LibreOffice
- Opens on
- Desktop and phone
- Delivery
- Instant download, plus an emailed link that does not expire
Who this is not for
If everyone at your table eats everything, you do not need this. There is nothing for it to count.
It does not plan your oven or your timings — that is a different problem and a different sheet. And it cannot calculate cross-contamination, because no spreadsheet honestly can. What it does is mark which guests have an allergy rather than a preference and put that in front of whoever is serving. The clean pan is still down to you.
It earns its place when two or more people at the table avoid different things, when you are cooking ten dishes or more, and when at least one of those restrictions is an allergy.
Before you buy
Do I need to pay for Google Sheets?
No. Google Sheets is free with any Google account. If you would rather use Excel, that file is in the same download.
Somebody avoids something that is not one of the five columns.
Rename a column you are not using — the headings are ordinary cells. Nightshades, shellfish, alcohol and low-salt all fit the same machinery, as long as you rename the matching column on both tabs.
Is this a substitute for asking people?
No, and please ask them. This is for after the conversation, so that what somebody told you in October is still on the table in December instead of in a text message you cannot find.
Does it handle cross-contamination?
Not as a calculation. It marks which guests have an allergy rather than a preference and puts that in front of whoever is serving. The clean pan is down to you.
Does it plan the cooking or the oven?
No. Timings are a different sheet. This one only answers who can eat what.
How many guests and dishes does it hold?
Twenty guests and thirty dishes. If you are past either, you are catering, and you already have a system.
What if it does not work for me?
Email us within 14 days and we refund it. You keep the file. We would rather have the feedback than the nine dollars.
Reviews
★★★★★Tom
Cooking for fourteen with four different sets of restrictions. This stopped me making three separate meals — it turns out most of it overlaps if you can actually see it written down.
★★★★★Rachel D.
Coeliac sister, vegan nephew, and a father-in-law who will not eat anything green. Laying all of that out before planning the menu instead of after is the obvious thing to do and I have never once done it.
All ten holiday planners — $39
The gift budget, the Thanksgiving timeline, the blended-family gift tracker, the remote Secret Santa kit, the cookie swap planner, the two-families travel budget, the fifty-card Christmas list, the mixed-diet menu planner, the toddler activity calendar, and the ninety-day January debt reset. Bought separately they are $90.
Get all ten — $39
