As mentioned in my last posting, nearly all of our Dinner Club meals are centered around one type of theme or another. Not all of them require an overwhelming need for “Décor”, but some most certainly do in order to achieve the best mood or setting for the ultimate enjoyment of our meal. What do I mean? Read on!
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| Our Outdoor Vodka tasting bar on Russian Night |
I mentioned in that last post about special touches for particular themes that help enhance and make Dinner Club more of an event, but what about when those themes require you to get creative on a larger scale? Does that mean spending a ton of money to rent props, haul in extra tables, pay for an expensive caterer to supply the needed items to up your “wow factor”? Absolutely not! All it does require is a little ingenuity and a tiny bit of extra time spent to make the occasion memorable. Not a lot of time. Just some, so that thirty years from now, your Dinner Club is still one of the highlights of your year with good friends! “Examples?” you say? Here ‘goes!
Last season, our dinner club decided we would have a “Russian Night” dinner with, obviously, foods of that culture, and a vodka tasting bar. The concept of the tasting bar was simple enough; each couple would bring a different flavored vodka and a cocktail recipe and ingredients that could be prepared from their particular flavor. The planning part is easy enough, but what about the mechanics of the vodka bar?
Certainly, we could all show up and stick the bottles in the host’s refrigerator or stuff them in a tub filled with ice, but what would make it memorable? What would really spark the ambiance of a Russian meal on a cold, Nebraska-in-February
To make our “carved ice” bottle block we (my almost-on-board husband and I) lined a rectangular, plastic recycle bin with plastic sheeting and filled empty two-liter soda pop bottles with rocks. We set six of the bottles in the plastic-lined bin and filled ¾ of the way up around the bottles with water and silver glitter. We lowered the recycle bin into our basement deep freezer and gave it about a week. On the day of Dinner Club, we unmolded the ice block by running water over and around it to loosen the recycle bin and the plastic bottles from the center. We were left with perfect “bottle sized” openings.
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| Our Ice Centerpiece on Russian Night with embedded snowflakes and silver branches |
We set a table just outside the back patio doors – close enough to reach when you just open the door, so no one would have to actually step outside – dressed it with a sparkling indigo table cloth and placed our block on it. Additionally, we employed the same technique with empty plastic tubs and cups to achieve “ice luminaries” for the front walkway and the table centerpiece (with a bowl for the ice to drip into once we lit the candle inside). These frozen, sparkling accents added to the ambiance of that night and cost us next to nothing beyond the water and some glitter!
For another culturally-centered meal, our “North African Night” it felt appropriate to move away from the traditional dining room table and feast in a more rustic fashion at tables with pillows on the floor for our seating. “Rustic” doesn’t mean that I didn’t use gorgeous linens in colors that, for me, evoked the hues of an African safari, but I already owned the linens and simply sought to purchase flowers that backed up my intended “look” for the evening. Don’t go out and buy the whole store. Use what you have and make it all tie together. Maybe a plain white table cloth, some remnant fabric and a few well-selected branches from your yard would work to? Experiment.
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| No plastic buckets showing here! |
For the African meal, we used our round coffee table for one dining table and removed the glass top off of another table to set for dinner, but how to make the glass dining table a similar height to the coffee table-level seating we were wanting? Out to the garage my husband went, at my all-too-gentle command to rustle up those five gallon buckets he’s been swearing to me for years we actually needed! With three well-placed buckets underneath the glass top and beautiful table linens to hide the shame underneath, we were set!
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| Close up of the table linens and flowers at our North African Dinner |
