Although I’m sure we won’t be invited to host our own Food Network
spinoff as a result, we will have a fantastic and uproariously good time
together. How do I know this? Years of experience, my fellow foodies… Our group
has graduated beyond the basics with our Dinner Club events. We are now in our
sixth year together and are steadily exploring new ways to enjoy cooking and
eating together.
Yes, when you first begin a group such as ours, you cling to
basic types of cuisines and keep the themes cultural for the most part.
Although I still THOROUGHLY enjoy exploring the foods of different cultures –
we have one coming up in February that should be amazing – I do love exploring
other stimuli for the Dinner Club experience.
We’ve got a running list of ideas that we work from and add
to every year to form our six meetings a season. Among those ideas are offbeat
themes such as this “Iron Chef” takeoff. We’ve had Dinner Clubs that focus on historical
time periods (such as our roaring 20’s dinner), major events in history (our
“last night on the Titanic meal), and other ones developed from pop-culture
trends (such as our Mad Men dinner last year).
Iron Chef is a foodie-culture phenomenon as well as an
opportunity for us to “compete” against one another for top honors (Ok, there
actually are none other than a pat on the back and a congratulatory handshake)!
We simply thought this would be a new and interesting take on our monthly
meetings throughout the fall and winter months here in Nebraska
For this particular Dinner Club we’ve obviously had to break
from our typical planning format. We’ve still assigned a particular portion of
the meal to each of our six couples; however, we did not discover the “secret
ingredient” until this week when the host house drew from a list of ten
possible ones. We now have two days to decide what we will be making for our
course and how we will best represent the said ingredient: Cinnamon.
You can refer to our menu book page below for our format for
this unusual meeting. I, of course, will keep you informed next week of what
was produced and who reigned supreme in the Gretna Dinner Club Iron Chef
competition… Let the cooking begin!
