Dinner club introductions

Oh boy, it's time for dinner club again!  We get so excited because there is always great conversation, great drink and absolutely fabulous food!

A couple of years ago, Mary and I had an idea to start a dinner club, and were able to get it started last year.  We created a wonderful group of six women who love to cook...and more importantly, appreciate great food!

Do you have a group of 'foodies' that you think would like to try having a dinner club?  If so, we highly encourage you to try it!  After your first dinner, you'll be hooked!  We've had a successful year of dinner club, and we have learned a lot!  Here are the 'guidelines' we follow for our Dinner Club that has worked out well for us, so grab a group of friends, and try creating a dinner club!

1. We limited our Dinner club members to six people, so we meet every other month.  You may be able to include a few more people, but too many people may make it hard to coordinate.  No matter how many are in your group, we highly suggest that they are fun (or slightly crazy, like our group), love to cook and try new recipes, and give honest feedback.   
2. Each person should host dinner club once a year...well, that works out well for us with six members.  Whoever hosts the dinner club gets to decide what the theme will be for that month and make the main dish.  Usually it works out where we can assigned a course to the other members - salad, appetizer, side dish, bread, dessert; but we did do a few themes (like soup), where we didn't have different courses...even though the chocolate soup was wonderful as a dessert!
3. The recipe you make must be a new recipe that you haven't tried before - this is hard sometimes, but thankfully, there are a lot of comments on websites to give an idea if the recipe is worth a try or not.  This is the hardest one to follow, and a couple of people have broken the rule a couple of times!   
4. Enjoy the wonderful food and be prepared to be overly stuffed!  

Our group of women are a very eclectic, but fun group!  We each come from a different background, ages and stages in our lives.  When Mary and I decided we were going to do a food blog, we knew that we would need to include the food club meetings and recipes.  So, every other month, you'll get to see our recipes and read about dinner club antics in the blog. 'Yay!'  

Well, since we're going to include our group, we should probably introduce you to the extraordinary ladies!  Well, you've already been introduced to Mary and me in the past few weeks, so here's the rest... First, there is Ricki (Mary's Mom) who when you add wine has an incredibly infectious laugh.  Then Carol who is a lifelong friend of Ricki's, has great stories of how they misbehaved when their kids were young...bad girls!  Linda and Kathy work w/ Mary and Ricki at their family garden nursery, and are two ladies that are quite possibly the kindest women we know and are incredibly creative! The diversity of this group is what makes it so fun!

The food club for April was about making ravioli (the picture above is fried ravioli) hosted by Kathy, so there will be an extra blog this week with the details and recipes, so check back soon!