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The $15 Dinner Party
Times are tough with the ever-increasing cost of food. This makes the potluck dinner social event even more important. I believe you can host a dinner for six with an investment of about 10 or 15 dollars. Invite two other couples to share the meal. Ask one couple to bring a simple dessert for six and ask the other to bring an appetizer to munch on as the evening starts. Tell everyone to bring what they want to drink for the gathering. Discounting the cost of booze, everyone is on somewhat equal footing.
The main entree is chicken and dumplings with a green vegetable on the side. That may not sound elegant, but it is comfort food at its best. Purchase a roasted chicken from Costco for $4.99. Deconstruct the chicken by separating the skin, the meat, and the remaining carcass. Set the meat aside, but put the skin, bones, and some celery and carrots in a pot to make chicken stock. After you strain, the solid material from the stock you want about two cups of rich broth. Make sure you included the drippings that were in the plastic container that held the chicken.
Make a roux of butter and flour and add the stock to make two cups of fairly thin sauce. Steam some sliced carrots and celery in the microwave until they are nearly soft. Add the shredded chicken meat and the partially cooked vegetables to a deep, oven-safe skillet with the chicken broth. Season with salt, pepper, and herbs of your choice. Poultry seasoning will work, but don’t overdo it. Bring it to a simmer. Add an ounce or so of heavy cream. Drop flattened chunks of biscuit dough into the stew. Since I have celiac disease, I make the dough from a box of Red Lobster’s gluten-free biscuit mix, but Bisquick is the traditional dumpling mix. Cover the skillet for 10 or 15 minutes to let the dumplings rise. Finish it by putting it uncovered in a preheated oven at 425 degrees for another 15 minutes until the biscuits are slightly brown. Brush melted butter and a few herbs on the tops of the dumplings. Serve it with a simple green vegetable such as green beans or broccoli, and you are done.
This is just one simple example of making dinner parties a celebration of sharing rather than an ostentatious show of culinary prowess. I have discussed beef stew previously, which also is a comfort food that makes for good company.
Published in General
For those who have a Smart & Final and not Costco or don’t want to pay for Costco membership, when I was in Phoenix the various roasted chickens from Walmart, Kroger, etc, averaged about 2 lbs. The Smart & Final chickens were advertised as 3 lb, for about the same price – actually less than some places! – and I got some that were up to 5 lbs!
The alcoholic beverages seem like the one cost you can’t do anything about. But if you just allow your creativity to run free, you will be amazed what fun, but affordable drinks you can come up with!
For example, my wife and I use the traditional cocktail glasses, wine glasses, and beer mugs, but we just pour water into all of them! Not only is it cheap and tasty and locally sourced, but it brings back memories of a simpler time, when some of the guests were quite poor and lived on water and bread. Nothing like the aroma of water to transport us back to those good old days.
But don’t be limited by our ideas…come up with your own!
Water and bread if done right can be delicious and very satisfying. It’s all in the presentation.
Are we talking about strippers/”sex workers” again?
No just commenting that bread and water can be exquisite under the right circumstances.
Or try this creative way to use one of the many often-overlooked bargains in wine, in a fun way that your guests will be laughing over for years to come!
Buy a bulk pack of red Solo cups at Costco. These are incredibly inexpensive on a per-unit basis.
Blindfold your guests and give them each a red Solo cup containing some value-priced brand and flavor of wine. Have the guests drain their cups, and then have them all write their names and their guesses as to which wine they got on a scrap of paper. Collect the guesses in a dirt-cheap but festively colored party hat.
Draw the scraps out one at a time and announce the name and the wine that was guessed. Have your spouse bring a bottle or box of the actual wine and read the label out loud. Most of the guesses will be hilariously wrong!
My wife and I like to use these vintages:
The Boone’s farm varietals are priced at a sensible $5.49, so if you want to splurge a bit, why not blow a fiver and buy the Snow Creek bottle with an appropriate “Wax Dip White” top.
The price? Just another $5.00!
You know, you don’t have to splurge on Boone’s Farm to treat your guests to the lowest of synthetic wines. There are some very good wines that are that price, slightly immature but a delightful departeur, with a very fluorescent embrace, moody mid-tones, a piquant esplinage and a stringy after-sortle.
Or just get a nice fresh spanish tempranillo.
See your doctor if you have a stringy after-sortle lasting more than four hours.
It’s that bad? Oh. That’s what that was.
Be a rebel and serve coffee.
Rich
CorinthianColombian Coffee.Bookmarked.
My parents had people over every Saturday evening until my mother went into assisted living (my father had passed years before). People brought their hamburger meat to grill and their alcohol. Appetizers and sides were a group affair. Easy and casual, except that there was too much alcohol – those were the days of martinis. Now, when we have friends over, I spend all day preparing and cleaning. I am exhausted at the end of it. This means we entertain very infrequently. Sad.
I was a Boone’s Farm girl when I was drinking underage. We would pool our quarters to come up with the $2.50 for a bottle of Berry Frost.
Check out https://www.reversewinesnob.com/. When shopping at Aldi, Trader Joe, or Costco, I pull it up on my phone for inexpensive wine recommendations. I quietly added a. $8.99 bottle from the Aldi recommendations to a gathering. Later, someone pipes up that this wine was delicious – where did I get it from.