Ideas for hosting a cooking party

Cooking parties are fun and a great way to spend time with your friends. At the same time, you can learn cooking tips from others. In order to make everything to run smoothly, you need to organize the party very well. The main condition for nice, relaxing cooking parties is to have enough room and cooking tools for everyone.

The first step is to pick the menu. Once you’ve decided what you will cook, you have to buy all the ingredients. Make sure you don’t leave anything out. There is nothing more annoying than realizing, after you already started to cook, that you don’t have everything you need. So, take a good look at the recipes and make a list with all the ingredients. Another thing to think about - tableware, pans, pots, tablecloths, napkins and other cooking utensils. If you don’t have enough cooking tools and tableware for every one, you can either buy some more or you can simply borrow from friends the items you need. For setting the table, you can simply get some plastic or paper tableware.

When planning a cooking party, you should select some quick and fun to do recipes – pizza, different pies, lasagna, grilled vegetables, and salads are great for cooking parties. Make it fun – for example, you can ask each friend invited to the cooking party to select his or her favorite ingredient (a variety of cheese, a vegetable, salami, sausages, even fruits or other unconventional toppings) and make a huge pizza with all those ingredients.

Find a theme for your cooking party. For example, you can cook only things you can eat with your fingers – that’s a really funny theme, and all your friends will appreciate the idea. There are a lot of foods you can eat with the fingers. Just get barbecue sticks and add little pieces of meat, shrimp, and vegetables. Arrange them on a pan and pop them into a preheated oven. In the mean time, you and your friends can start working on soups and salads or other side dishes.

You can organize a very special cooking party, for your closest friends, around a cheese fondue pot. Cheese fondue is delicious, easy to make and fun to eat. There is a special tool for making cheese fondue, a pot placed on top of a heating source, but it’s not mandatory for making fondue cheese. All you need is a good –quality nonreactive pan, your favorite type of cheese, and a bottle of white wine and some spices. Garlic works great for cheese fondue. Basically, all you have to do is to melt the cheese on low heat and to add the wine and the garlic. Prepare a large pot, to have enough for everyone, and ask your friends to put together some salads for the cheese. You can have the cheese with cubed bread, slices of apples or pears and grapes. You can serve it directly from the pot, but you need some sticks for the bread and fruits.

So, next time you organize a cooking party, make sure you follow some of these great tips.




Jamie Highland writes about events and parties, like weddings and baby showers. To find out more about how to organize perfect events or to shop for baby shower tableware and other baby shower supplies, visit My Baby Shower Favors.