The beginnings

A few weeks ago, I was trying to come up with dinner ideas. As I wrote down a bunch of recipes with impossible foreign names that I imagined sounding yummy, I remembered that my kids don't usually like to eat foods outside of their comfort zone. I knew I had three options: 1) never tell my family what they were eating, 2) lie to them and tell them that I was just making a recipe that was given to me by the grease monkeys at McDonald's, 3) make dinner so much fun for the kids that they wouldn't care what they are eating. Option 3 seemed to be the best for obvious reasons. I buzzed Charity and asked her if she wanted to be in a dinner club with me. Once every month we would alternate who cooked dinner (the other would bring dessert). The cousins could play, the "adults" could talk, and hopefully we could get some good eats in the process. Well, yesterday was our first official dinner club meeting. Ethan and I were in charge of dinner. Charity set an impossibly high bar with her dessert. The food was so good and everyone, even the kids, ate way too much. But after all was said and done, Charity and I wanted to come up with a way to have our dinner club recipes handy. So, here it is. Hopefully, this can become a dumping ground for all of our club recipes and other tried and true favorites of those that want to contribute.

If you want to join in the fun, email me and I'll send you a contributors invite. The only rules are that you must have personally made the dish and preferably liked it, and you need to stick with our labels. We'll try to organize it logically with the dishes labeled in basic groups: entrees, bread, side, dessert, beverage. Happy eatings.