The GWFD-Dinner Post

On Friday Sarah and I headed over to Ali and Bob’s for the first official “Guests, What’s For Dinner-Dinner”. Ali and Bob suggested the idea a few weeks back and we’d been looking forward to giving it a try. The concept is pretty simple, but makes for a really interesting dinner event. Guests bring 4-5 random ingredients over for dinner which will have to be used in some way to build the meal everyone will be eating. For every ingredient brought an additional ingredient can be added. So for example if I brought over a lettuce, we could add some tomatoes to the list of items and make a salad. Necessary extras like seasoning, salt and sugar are free passes. Sarah and I brought over the following for the trial run:

• Chicken Breasts
• A Cucumber
• A packet of English Muffins
• A bottle of Morimoto Soba (Beer)
• Dipping chocolate

After deliberating around the table for a while thinking about our options we eventually settled on what we where going to shoot for and what we needed to add as the 5 allowable ingredients to add to the mix. After some thought about what we could and count leave of the list Ali and Bob added the following ingredients:

• Apples,
• Peppers
• Tomatoes
• Rice
• Feta Cheese

The evening was spent working away as a team building the meal out of what we had. I am not a cook by any stretch of the imagination, so working with Sarah, Ali and Bob was fun and educational for me. I learnt the best way to chop chicken (against the grain) and methods of determining when certain foods are cooked properly. When the dust settled we where left with a three course meal starting with a tasty Feta Salad, followed by a zesty dijon chicken dish served with toasted peppers over rice, and followed it up with a baked apple log drizzled with chocolate. It worked out really well and the meal was very tasty. If definitely didn’t taste the like the random assortment of ingredients that where splayed on the counter top a few hours before. The whole evening was a lot of fun and definitely something we’d like to try again. Hopefully any future attempts will result in as tasty a meal. Bob’s tagline for the event is ‘If the Dinner Goes Badly You Can Blame the Guests’- so we’ll have to be sure to pick wisely next time!