Good Food Reads: A Moveable Feast Finale-The Menu

Our dinner party has come and gone, the dishes have been washed and put away, but the great memories remain.  Join us for a glimpse of our Southern Themed Moveable feast, including our dinner party menu!

Here it is.  The long awaited full dinner party menu with links from our Southern Themed Dinner Party: A Moveable Feast (June 2017).  The lovely ladies that are involved in A Moveable Feast are all work colleagues who were brought into our lives due to our shared profession, but are now all dear and treasured friends thanks to all of the laughs shared over cocktails and full bellies.  And those great friends make life so much more sweet!  Read on for the full menu!

(Just a disclaimer, we’re not great at taking pictures AND hosting the dinner party, so these pictures are from various dinner parties throughout the last 2 years)

We have a few guidelines for our dinner parties.  No more than 8 courses (more than that is just out of control…we all got a little crazy during the first year).  We all sit down at a table for each course (even the hosts).  We pair up in order to host (it’s just too much work for one person).  We have 10 people so 5 dinners per cycle ensures that each pair of hosts gets a different season from year to year.  This year we are trying “themes”, hence the “Southern” dinner party.  Creativity reigns supreme.  Days of planning goes into these feasts and we often do some sort of trial of the recipes with our co-host or other loved ones (they love this).  Of course no dinner party has to be this elaborate-we just all enjoy the challenge (not to mention the reason to wear stretchy pants)!

We are already looking forward to the next scheduled dinner party (which we are not hosting-thanks Clare and Ann!) and we hope our experience motivates you to gather your friends, put together your own dinner party menu (or use ours, or any part of ours, after all the recipes are tried and true!), and enjoy some time with your people around the table.  After all, food brings people together, and isn’t what we all need right now?

Thanks to Emily R. and Shannon who got this all started on a cold night in November (setting the bar impossibly high!), and thanks to Clare, Ann, Kelly, Emily V, Megan, and Heidi who keep it all going!

Here are all of the courses/recipes/links.  If we did not invent them we made sure you know who did (in parentheses)!

Course 1: Bourbon Tea Cocktail, Cheese Straws (Ina Garten), Union Square Bar Nuts (Nigella Lawson)

Course 2: Grilled Peach and Arugula Salad

Course 3: Grilled Ricotta Toasts with Cherry Salsa (Bon Appetit)

Course 4: Chicken and Waffles

Course 5: Balsamic Peach and Basil Sorbet

Course 6:  Creamed Jalapeno Spinach, Mini-Biscuits (Serious Eats), Whipped Honey Butter

Course 7: Beer Braised Brisket, Pimento Cheese Smashed Potatoes, Not Your Mama’s Coleslaw (Smitten Kitchen), Homemade Barbecue Sauce (Smitten Kitchen), watermelon

Course 8: Dixie Pie

Cheers to friends, cheers to good food, cheers to forever memories!