Hi! My name is Elly and I've been a life long foodie. A few years ago, I started seeing an uprising of something that I called Characuterie board/buffet on steroids! It was captivatingly beautiful and the idea to have food set out at all at once and everyone can just "graze" as they please was a game changer! A whole party where people can snack non-stop, what could possibly be better? I have always been a huge entertainer, having parties almost weekly. I have always been the person that would bring food to every event, always from scratch. When I lived in Singapore, I also had a small catering business. You get it, I have always loved food and people. It was 2 years ago when I saw my first ever grazing board on Instagram, from someone in Australia. This trend had started in New Zealand and Australia and it was catching on around the world. Besides the visual beauty, it was a great idea for caterers because you actually use less ingredients in the long run. Why do I say in the long run? If you are doing it at home and you don't entertain often, you will be buying up so many ingredients only to use a bit of everything and leaving a lot of leftovers that could go stale, rendering them useless and leaving a lot of food waste on your hands. But if you are big entertainer and or a catering business, you will save a lot money because you use lesser quantity of each ingredient - since you would be spreading things out, you will inevitably be using less. There is a huge misconception that creating a grazing board/platter or table is easy because you just cut everything and throw it on there. However, this is the farthest thing from the truth. You need to practice a lot before you can master it. I started my very first platter in a friendly evening with my girlfriends (top left picture below - 2018) and as you can see, it was a rough start, but a start nonetheless! I still did the job and everyone was in awe and it was a great conversation piece. I had wine and the board in the middle which allowed us to graze and talk till 5am. I would say that's a successful party by any standard. I then became very interested in this style of entertaining, so I made it every chance I got and I started to follow more Instagram stars and paid attention to the details to get more inspiration. And with practice, and a year and a half of difference, you can see how much I improved (top right picture below - 2019)

Now let's talk about the most impactful presentation, the grazing table! Now this is another level of amazing. It makes people stop in their tracks and just take it all in. Eating suddenly becomes infinitely more fun, because it's also a teasure hunt. What shall we eat first? What IS everything? What goes with what? The possibilities become endless, mixing and matching. I am a big fan of entire meals on a grazing table. As a person who usually entertains large groups of people, I am constantly running around and doing stuff the entire time. I am also Iranian/Russian and we cook for 20 when we have 2 guests, so you can imagine the pain of large parties and a small apartment. Appetisers, main meal and then dessert. By the end of the day I am too exhaused and have not eaten anything. That's not the most ideal for me because I won't enjoy the party at all. Enter full mean grazing tables, now this is a BEAST of work. It takes so much before hand preparation and many many hours of planning ahead. BUT, once you do all of that, you are completely free to enjoy the entire party with everyone else. People can choose to have dessert first, main course last, or yo-yo betweeen all of them. Every single party that's been like this has been a huge success and I don't go to bed hungry. Just to show you the huge difference in wow factor, look at the pictures below. The bottom left picture is my husband's 30th birthday where I cooked and slaved over 3 days straight and it was beautiful in it's own accord. Then look at bottom right picture, my husband's 35th birthday. Isn't that just beautiful? Everyone ate for 8 hours straight with so much dancing and laughter. To say it was memorable is an understatement!