Tag: strawberries

Throwing your very first dinner party can be intimidating—particularly if any invitees are talented cooks—but a meal in three courses is an excellent and manageable place to begin. (You can graduate to five later.)

Course 1
Cranberry and Bleu Cheese Spinach Salad

Get a big salad bowl and salad tongs. Buy two bags of fresh spinach leaves and toss with roasted honey walnuts, crumbled bleu cheese and dried cranberries. You can buy the walnuts pre-roasted or roast them yourself by tossing honey and sugar-coated raw nuts onto a foiled cookie sheet covered in cooking spray and roasting in a 350F oven for 8 minutes.

We have a tradition of Sunday dinners in our family. I don’t have a particularly large, related-by-blood family, but I do have a wonderful group of friends who have become our extended family and are as much my sisters and brothers as if we shared the same DNA. The dinners don’t happen every Sunday, but we try at least once a month. Occasionally, they are at my house, but usually my mother is the one to host these meals, inviting a changing cast of characters—some new, some spanning decades. Over the years it has evolved; first my mom’s friends and "strays," then my friends (and later, my husband’s friends) came into the mix. Once our generation got married, our friend’s kids now come to Sunday dinner.