Delicious Dinner with Friends & Money Spent

Last night we hosted a pot luck dinner with some friends, including a fellow food blogger in from North Carolina – the author of Piedmont Review of Food.  The rough theme of the night was Indian food, so our guests brought over some sweet potato curry, cucumber raita, and fixins for a huge salad with roasted beets, pears, and homemade candied pecans. Phil and I made chapatis, Red Lentils Tarka from Madhur Jaffreys Quick & Easy Indian Cooking, and a big pan of caramelized onions.

For dessert we made Pumpkin & Brown Sugar Crème Brûlées and our friends brought some homemade truffles flavored with Earl Grey & Curry Truffles. 

We used to really love throwing dinner courses where we would cook elaborate meals – sometimes five or six courses – for our friends. Of course, we haven’t really been able to throw down like that since we started this experiment, but potluck-style worked out fine.  If everybody cooks, nobody has to spend too much. Extra food can go home with guests (we made a LOT of lentils and still have a jar of dried ones) or you can keep some for yourself.

Some of the meal sounds fancy, but all the ingredients were covered by the money we had leftover from Thanksgiving week.  Here’s what we spent some of it on:

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough from Trader Joe’s: .99
Coop Shopping for Sunday Dinner Party (red lentils, oats, apples, onions, garlic powder, cardamon, garam masala, turbinado sugar): 12.35
Extra Stuff (heavy cream, sugar and orange juice) from Key Foods: 9.07

Total: $22.41

And we still have $6.68 leftover if we want to add on to this week’s $30.

Granola is in the oven right now for tomorrow’s breakfast and it smells gooooooood.  Cinnamon, buckwheat honey, some toasted almond slivers and cranberries.

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