Neighborhood Progressive Dinner

We had our neighborhood progressive dinner this week, where appetizers, salads, main course and desserts are all at different houses. Sixteen adults and 3 children on our block participated. My house was the "salad house."

Here is my "bad kitty" helping me set the table.
Appetizers, lots of them! These dinners are nights when everyone eats too much. The hot artichoke dip was hard to stop eating!

I did three salads: Caesar, chicken salad and a chopped salad. I put out cards listing the ingredients so people wouldn't be surprised by anything they might not like. For example, I put dried apricots in the chicken salad, and that can scare some people. The main dish event I featured on Boise Daily Photo - it was ham and stuffed baked potatoes.

This is a quickly-disappearing dessert tray of cream puffs and "Spinuzzis" - which are similar to a dessert cannelloni. They were fabulous.

That's a cheesecake birthday cake, one of our neighbors was celebrating a birthday on dinner night. There was also pecan pie, pumpkin pie, sugar cookies and that bottle had an interesting concoction in it called bushwhacker. It was a mix of all kinds of liquors, and notice there were really small cups by the bottle, that was a good thing. The giant carafe was filled with spice cranberry juice, and there was also hot chocolate, along with creme de menthe for those who wanted a little extra in the chocolate.

I highly recommend this type of event in your neighborhood. Involve 6-8 houses to keep the number controllable. We've also done this in the summer with a "front yard barbecue" version.