DIY Dinner Parties

How To Throw A DIY Dinner Party

If you grow your own vegetables at an allotment or in your garden, throwing a dinner party made with your home-grown produce is the perfect way to show off your green-fingered skills. Creating a DIY dinner party is a great way to challenge yourself and showcase your home-grown produce to your friends and family. Here is how you can throw a DIY dinner party.

A home-grown dinner party might sound like a stressful idea but you have already done the difficult bit by growing the produce for eating. It can be the easiest dinner party you’ve thrown yet as your shopping list will be tiny! Celebrate your summer harvest by getting your nearest and dearest together for your DIY dinner party.

Be savvy with planning

As you are relying on your own back garden instead of the supermarket for the shopping list, be savvy with when you want to host your DIY dinner party. You do not want to set a date in the diary only to find most of your crop is not ready to harvest yet. You might have to send out a quick WhatsApp message or give people a ring with short notice but at least all of your food will be ready, and most importantly, it will be yours. 

Harvest your crop

Before you throw your dinner party, head out into your garden or down to your allotment for the harvest. Make notes in the upcoming weeks of what will be ready, what foods you want to include and start researching recipes that will include most of your produce so you can make the most out of it.

Plan your recipes

If you have a huge crop of root vegetables, start thinking about how you can serve them once harvested. Grabbing a piece of meat from your local butcher such as lamb and serve your seasonal vegetables with it. If you are hosting vegetarians or want to have a vegetarian option, a tart is a great route to go down as you can include a tonne of vegetables in the topping. Pinterest is a great place to look for home-grown produce recipes but there a lot of cookbooks on the market that specialise in grown-your-own recipes. If you have a huge crop of berries in your garden/allotment then dessert is sorted! Either serve on their own with ice cream, cream and meringues or make a pavlova or cheesecake.

Make use of everything from the garden

Do not just showcase your food crop when throwing your DIY dinner party. Accessorize your table setting with flowers you’ve grown, plant vases of flowers from the garden all around the house and garnish drinks with flowers and herbs. Make the most of your herb garden by using it in all your cooking or pot up small herbs onto the table so guests can help themselves to it, adding to the DIY feel of the evening.

Gift your guests with a home-grown gift bag

If you have a lot of vegetables/fruit/flowers left over from your crop, give your guests a little parting gift of a goodie bag filled with some of your produce and finish the evening on a magical note.