ENTERTAINING Learn to balance the scales when planning a party

Thoughtful hosts provide low-carb alternates at holiday festivities.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
Don't ask. Don't tell. The advice became famous in a vastly different context, but it also applies to holiday entertaining among the carb-conscious.
"If I go to someone's house, I never make a big deal of it," says Raleigh, N.C., lawyer Richard Gusler, who has had a net weight loss of 30 pounds on the Atkins diet. "When people come to our house, we cook potatoes, rice or macaroni-and-cheese. I'm not imposing the way I want to eat on them. I just don't eat it."
Dana Carpender, author of several low-carb cookbooks and a follower of the Atkins plan for the past eight years, tries to strike a proper balance when entertaining. When she can, she "de-carbs" traditional holiday favorites with replicas that are hard to distinguish from the original: stuffing made with low-carb bread, Splenda-sweetened pumpkin pie in a ground pecan crust, cranberry sauce made with whole berries and sweetener.
Given a choice
If a substitute just won't work, she offers the original and a low-carb alternative. "I'll have pureed cauliflower for (my sister) and me, and a bowl of mashed potatoes for my die-hard traditionalist dad," she says in a telephone interview from her home in Bloomington, Ind.
Miss Manners would approve.
In her books, advice columnist Judith Martin (Miss Manners) champions the right of adults to choose what they want to eat but not to force others to adhere to their choices.
For hosts, this means providing a well-rounded meal no matter what their own dietary constraints. Don't ask guests to follow your diet and don't tell them what you think of theirs.
"If she's on a pitiful diet, she is obliged to excuse herself as briefly and lightly as possible from joining them in the hearty fare that she has provided," Martin writes in her book, "Miss Manners' Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium."
Thoughtful hosts
And although a guest can't tell a host to supply special foods to accommodate a diet, hosts who know Atkins devotees are in their circle of friends will thoughtfully provide low-carb options for them.
It isn't that hard during the holidays, Atkins dieters point out. Many popular party foods such as shrimp, cheese, mixed nuts, chicken wings, meatballs, cocktail wieners and vegetable crudites are naturally low in carbohydrates.
"In most cases, at a holiday dinner, they have a lot of protein -- ham, cold cuts, cheese, turkey," Gusler says.
Dieting guests who are worried about getting enough to eat have two options, Carpender says. "You can eat something before you go. Or you can bring something you can eat that everyone else will like."
Carpender prefers the latter choice.
"If you bring shrimp, nobody will go, 'Oh, you brought diet food,'" she says. "They'll be, 'Oh, wow! Shrimp!'"
Be able to pick and choose
One sticky issue is "mixed" foods, high-carb and high-protein pairings that just seem to go together -- except in the Atkins plan. Cheese on crackers, for example, or ham on rye. Hosts who don't want a buffet presentation dismantled should consider serving deli meats with toothpicks, with cocktail-size bread slices on the side. Cheese can be cubed or sliced and served with toothpicks, too, or placed atop special low-carb crackers.
For their part, guests should refrain from separating protein from carb until the food is safely on their individual plates, for appearance's sake.
"I'm pretty quick to pull the meat off a sandwich," Gusler says.
Carpender is, too, especially at less formal gatherings. "I would discreetly pick the cheese filling out and leave the shells of raviolis or eat the toppings of pizza and leave the crust behind," she says.
But a dismantled sandwich is small potatoes in the etiquette world compared to the crime of what Miss Manners calls the "forced hospitality" of "food pushers."
"Their endless patter of coercion -- 'Oh, come on, one won't hurt you, I made this especially for you, it doesn't have any calories, you're too thin anyway, it's good for you, you're not going to make me eat leftovers tomorrow' -- often succeeds in driving people to drink and chocolate," she writes in "Miss Manners' Guide to Domestic Tranquility."
Once is enough
Hosts should not urge guests to eat too much or to try something they have already refused.
A polite but firm "no, thank you" is the guest's best response in the face of this badgering, Martin writes. The guest should never have to explain why.
But Carpender advises dieters to go a step further if the barrage won't stop. "These people are not being nice," she says. "It's much more effective to say, 'I can't have that' than 'I won't eat that' or 'I'm on a diet.' Make it sound unquestionable, which it should be, and make it sound medical, which it is."