Diwali dinner

Invitation and menu

I created the invitation on Canva by using a preexisting free template. The invitation and the menu have the same layout so here is the menu:

Recipes

Here are the recipes I used:

• Spring rolls
• Aloo tuk
• Mushroom Biryani
• Sindhi Kadhi - no publicly available recipe. I will share my family recipe in a bit!
• Kadak chai panna cotta

Lessons learnt

• This was the first time my husband and I were hosting friends together, and I appreciate not having to clean before, cook, host and then clean after. It can get to being a lot. I love him for baring all the cleaning responsibilities and for sharing the hosting responsibilities too.
• I do miss my serving ware as we had to improvise a lot. I also miss having plates for guests to eat from. They definitely add to the cleaning pile but they make it feel like an adult party.
• Having a separate buffet table that people can pull from makes it much more organized and less chaotic when a large group of people are eating. This is especially important when you dont have a dining table that seats all your guests.
• I fell back in love with hosting and realized that I love throwing dinner parties and hosting friends - it really brings me joy.
• We surprised our guests with fire crackers and they appreciated that a lot. While fire crackers aren't an every party occurrence it did add delight to the event. This made me wonder how I can bring delight to other dinner parties I host - a goodie bag?
• Candles and mood lighting are integral to a dinner party and help combat the cooking smells in a small house. I do want to get some votive and tapered candle holders.

I am looking forward to hosting more dinner parties (even if they are brunch themed) and will share some ideas in an upcoming blogpost!