Great dinner parties

If you like to entertain, you might glean a couple ideas here from the Barrengers, some friends of mine. I prefer to be entertained. The Barrengers throw the best dinner parties I’ve ever been to, but that is colored by my idea what is fun.

The first one we were invited to had a Chinese food theme. There were sixteen guests. The hosts divided us into five teams, with no couple being on the same team. When you were “up,” your team adjourned to the kitchen to make that course. The ingredients were arrayed on the counters and recipes taped to the faces of the cabinets. The idea was to come up with the best preparation and presentation.

It was not intended to be an intense competition, but that was part of the fun. Our team went fourth. Once the raw ingredients were cooking, two of us snuck upstairs to see what we could ferret out for a dramatic presentation.

When the food was done, we turned out the lights in the dining room. We were now clad in robes with towels draped over our heads, to resemble monks. One of us carried the tray of food, another a portable boombox. Two of us bore lit candles. Before we entered, the music was turned on (“You can’t always get what you want” by the Stones). Then, we entered in a slow, in-step processional.

We received a standing ovation and the prizes. But, it would’ve been great fun in any event.

My favorite of theirs was the “puzzle dinner,” for lack of a better description. There were four courses, appetizer, soup & salad, entrée and dessert.

Before sitting down, you received a check-off “menu” to select the food, beverage and utensils you wanted for each course. Actually, what you got was a list of clues that you allocated between the four courses.

Those clues included: precedes pray (lettuce), San Francisco/Denver/Philadelphia (mints), Jiminy’s cousin with a Greek letter (grasshopper pie), Jack’s ladder (beans), where Popeye dances (spinach balls), kind of bill (spoon), valuable weights (carrots), mount n’ groan (coffee), comes from a tempo or hooked stick (sugar), split road (fork), etc.

Almost no one gets it all right and that’s where the fun comes in. Someone receives soup and the wrong or no utensil. Another gets his pie with a side of sauerkraut for an entrée.

Some may enjoy their parties straight up with a perfectly done prime rib. I prefer mine with a twist.