Supper Club Menus

[Sooze]

Does your Supper Club have one member set the menu and all recipes for a gathering, or do you assign a catagory of dish to each member and have a "pot-luck" sort of menu?
I can see benefits to both styles and would like a little feed-back from experienced Supper Club-ers.

Thanks,
Susan

[MNGirlTX]

For us, the hostess chooses the "theme" and the main dish and we all just pick whatever we want to accompany it. We've been together for just over a year, and, so far, this seems to work well for us.

Lori

[Hawkgt]

Our club works the same as Lori's. The hostess chooses the main course, and the rest of the group chooses whatever sides, etc. they'd like. But we all usually bring a dessert! Our husbands like to say we should change our name to the Dessert Club. We've been meeting for a little over 2 years now, and this method has worked well for our group.

Shannon

[tbb113]

I belonged to one club where the hostess picked all the recipes and then we chose which one we wanted to make. That worked great the first year when the magazine was doing a country a month (we just picked those recipes). I was harder in future years (plus you couldn't cook what you wanted).

The current club that I belong to doesn't even set a theme. The hostess picks the main course and the rest of us just pick a dish that goes along with it (within reason). So the faster you respond to the initial post, the more choices (side/salad/soup/dessert) you have to pick from :)

It really depends on the dynamics of the group and how much control/direction you need.

[rburganmckinley]

We pick a theme together, and then draw for the course of the meal we have to prepare. That way we "expand" our horizons and don't make the same course each month. The hostess picks the recipe for the thing we make together as a group. This seems to work pretty well for us.

[Chelle D]

Our hostess picks a theme and makes the main dish. The hostess usually then assigns courses to the rest of us and rotates it based on what we brought last time. Last time we got together though, we all brought a fav family dish and didn't assign courses. It worked well and we got to know each other better!

[Peggy]

We've been meeting for over 5 years. The hostess picks the theme and makes the main course and then we usually pick what we want to bring from there. Our group actually cooks together so it does take so coordination to make the oven and stove needs work out and to get the dinner on the table on time.

Peggy

[Grace]

Our group has been meeting for more than five years too. We don't do themes, we just choose whatever from the current issue of CL. The hostess chooses the main dish, and the rest of us all choose any other dish we want (our menus don't always go together, but we like it like that). We email the whole group with our choice, so each person tries to choose a different course so we don't end up with one entree and 6 desserts, and we also don't end up with any duplicates. Our group is good about being very diverse with the courses. Last night for example, at our meeting, we had the Red Wine Sangria (a beverage), an appetizer, a soup, an entree, three veggie sides and two desserts. It was all wonderful!

I especially like that we can all choose to make what we like (I wouldn't like being "assigned" something) based on our time constraints and our budgets. I would never assign someone a dish that required very expensive ingredients (crab meat, standing rib roast, expensive mushrooms, etc.), but I would choose one for myself if I really wanted to make that dish and my funds allowed for it.