Every few months I share photos from my dinner group and tell you all about how much fun we have.  For those of you who are new to my blog, here’s how it works.  Every few months (we shoot for once a month) the hostess chooses four recipes that she has never tried before.  She purchases the ingredients for those recipes and sets up four cooking stations in her kitchen.  When the guests arrive, we each choose a recipe that we are interested in making and start cooking.  When you are at your own house, in your own kitchen, cooking alone, it can sometimes seem like a chore.  But, when you are cooking with friends, it is so much more fun!

This time, we had Dinner Group at my friend Dawn’s house.  She has a beautiful backyard and the weather was sunny and warm.  We ate outside, after dinner was done.

(I usually bring my fancy camera, but I forgot this time.  It was a good chance to try out the quality of the iphone 6 camera.  I think the color/white balance was slightly off, but overall it took nice photos. Gotta love technology that you can take with you!)

I’m not a drinker, but we usually have some sort of cocktail along with dinner.  This one was called a Hula Girl.  I stuck with water, but this smelled really yummy!

Ooh, check out the bokeh (background blur) with my iphone picture.  Not bad, Apple!

We had salad, pasta, drinks, and dessert.  The pasta had chicken, tomato, spinach, and cheese.  You can’t go wrong with that combination!

The salad was very interesting because it was a combination I would never have thought about putting together.  It had fruit, spinach, and quinoa.  It was really tasty and I was surprised that I liked it!

The recipe I made was the cheesecake puffs for dessert.  Um, I think you can tell just by looking that these were SUPER tasty.  It was a puffed pastry, stuffed with cream cheese filling and strawberries, topped with powdered sugar, chocolate, and almonds.  I could live on these!

I think I say this every time I post about my dinner group, but I will say it again.  This is really the perfect dinner party!  You don’t have to do any cooking ahead of time and it’s just a great way to spend quality time with friends.  I also love the fact that it gets me trying new foods, that I know I wouldn’t try on my own, and trying new recipes too!  

Happy cooking!