Fancy a nice evening of dinner with friends, but don’t feel like spending a lot of money on it? This is how you organize a cozy but cheap friends dinner.
1. Drinks for the friends dinner
Do you both really like cocktails? Then you can of course order it in a café, but if you organize something at home that becomes a little more difficult. You often have to buy a lot for just one type of cocktail and you don’t need all of the ingredient, which is a shame for both the product and your wallet. Perhaps your friends can help you with this: for example, do you have no juice? Then it may well be that they still have it in the refrigerator. And someone else probably has that bottle of drink that you only need a few centiliters of.
A good bottle of wine or a tasty specialty beer is a bit more difficult to make, but you can also make other drinks yourself. For example, consider ice tea or make your bottle of water a little more beautiful by adding mint, cucumber and lemon. This way you turn every drink at the friends dinner into an experience.
2. Bring Your Own
Organize a BYO party: everyone can bring something, such as drinks, snacks, desserts or their favorite dish. For example, let everyone bring something for a barbecue: one person brings meat, the other vegetarian snacks, a homemade salad and another thinks about the drinks. This way you can always taste new things and the dinner with friends is not so expensive.
3. Vegetable boards
Look, a cheese or meat board is of course very tasty, but it can also be quite expensive. You can also opt for something else tasty as a starter, such as a vegetable platter with tasty dips. For example, mix some yogurt with herbs for the dip, and place carrots, cucumber, radishes, celery and peppers around it. And if you have any vegetables left over, you can use them the next day for soup or salad.
4. Simple menu
We get it: you want to go big for this dinner. You’ve probably already found countless delicious recipes that will keep you busy all day preparing them. Maybe that delicious salad with burrata, the difficult-to-make beef wellington or a dessert with way too many ingredients. Yet a simple menu can score just as well, without spending too much time and money on it. Maybe you can swap the burrata salad for bruscetta, replace the beef wellington with a good pasta and swap the difficult dessert for a tasty ice cream with some fruit? A dinner with friends is not about culinary skills, but rather about getting together.
