I am hosting a little galentines get together with my friends, and I have already made it potluck style where everyone is asked to bring a snack of some sort, but I did say I would provide dinner. I am thinking tacos or pasta because its easy and cheap, but do you guys have any other food tips to stay low budget? Or other hosting tips in general to make sure people have a good time but your dollar isn't too too affected?
Also, I've already got decor and I might buy a cheap thrifted table cloth that is "in theme" but other than that I don't really plan on buying anything else!
What are your frugal hosting tips??
byu/waterhorsies inFrugal
Posted by waterhorsies
8 Comments
Shop at Aldi. You can put together a killer dinner for a very reasonable price.
I’ve done shakshouka with nice bread in the past and it’s pretty budget friendly! Depends how many people you’re feeding
the usual hack is to time events for between meals if feeding everyone would be a stretch.
check with everyone on any dietary restrictions — it can be awkward to serve pasta if someone is gluten-free, for instance.
A food that people assemble themselves, like tacos or sandwiches, is ideal if there are any picky eaters. If they don’t like an ingredient, they can just skip it!
Use your home’s screens to set the ambiance. Pick background music and put a video on loop that turns your TV into a window to a thematically appropriate place — a quiet park where all the flowers are blooming, perhaps?
Make sure you’ve got enough seating. Don’t be ashamed to pull in stuff from other rooms to get the main area cozy, especially good chairs.
If you’re serving drinks, find a way to make it easy to tell whose drink is whose. Maybe you could use plastic cups and pick up some kids’ valentines day stickers at the dollar store, and let everyone sticker their cup into uniqueness? Or if you have matching wine glasses, dig in your craft supplies or jewelry box to find decorations that you could put on the wine glass stems to make each one individual.
Having a clean and tidy space is so much more important than filling it with decorations.
Don’t.
Crockpot dogs and salads
Ask not just for snacks, but SIDES. So you just have to make tacos, but they’ll bring salads, etc. Drinks. Dessert. Have them bring stuff that connected meaningfully to your efforts and costs.
Stir fry.
We often make 4 or 5 types of rice or noodles stir fry for a party. They are all the same base recipe with a slight variation of sauce and vegetable to make it feel like it is 5 totally different dishes.
I figure it costs about $3 to make a stir fry for my family of 5 and enough leftovers to pack my lunch for two days .
We also do “make your own tapas” parties. We make a big batch of masa and a bunch of taco toppings(beans, refried beans,ground beaf,olives, onions,salsa,etc) everyone rolls out their own small tortillas from the masa, cooks them in the skillet, then tops them with the topping and eats it. Then they make another one and do it again and again. Cooking and eating becomes the activity for most of the evening this way. People find it to be neet idea and most people enjoy it.
Take turns and stop inviting those who don’t take their turn. If someone doesn’t want to cook they can either buy pizza for their turn or collaborate with someone who does like to cook and make up for it by buying more expensive ingredients. That said dishes like chili and cornbread, pasta and garlic bread +simple salads are cheap enough I’m not gonna be put out if people don’t return the favour.