Foodie Friday : Iron Chef Dinner Party

This past weekend, Mark and I hosted our first grown-up dinner party. One where, you know, you're not balancing a plate full of barbeque in one hand and a red Solo cup of beer in the other while trying to find a seat on anything resembling a flat surface. We managed to rearrange our tiny condo to seat 12 people, even if the chairs were a bit mish-mash and we didn't have enough place mats and cloth napkins for everyone. We'll just say it was cozy and quaint :)

We settled on an Iron Chef theme-- the invitations I designed revealed a secret ingredient of citrus fruits and instructed guests to bring a specific dish {appetizer, salad, dessert or drinks} with the only rule being that it had to incorporate lemon, lime, orange or grapefruit in some way. As the hosts, we took care of the two entree items and provided the drinks.

A few of our friends share our "foodie" mentality, but several more aren't quite that adventurous when it comes to cooking and eating, so we didn't know what to expect from everyone. But we were pleasantly surprised at how fun everyone seemed to have with the challenge. Here was the final menu:

Appetizers 

Meyer Lemon-Fava Bean Bruschetta topped with a Orange Slaw and Greens 

Tequila Lime Barbeque Chicken Wings

Salad 

Mixed Green Salad with Cranberries, Oranges, Goat Cheese and Pecans

Entrees 

Pork Tenderloin in an Orange-Herb Sauce 

Antipasto-style Pasta Salad with Artichokes, Olives, Pimentos and Cheese in a Lemon Vinaigrette

Desserts 

Orange-Ginger Cheesecake with Raspberry Sauce 

Lemon Cake Pops and a Lemondrop Shot

Drinks 

Clemojitos {Clementine mojitos} 

Cucumber Lime Margarita Jello Shots 

Rosemary Lemonade with Vodka

Sorry for the lack of photos! We're were having too much fun eating and forgot to snap the action.

I also designed a scorecard to score each of the dishes 1-10 for Taste and Creativity {we eliminated the "presentation" category used on the Iron Chef TV show because our guests were bringing their dishes already prepared, and we didn't want people to worry about how dishes having to be plated all fancy}. After dinner, we spent a few minutes scoring the dishes-- we skipped scoring our own dishes, and us non-meat eaters just scored the ones that we ate.

Mark added up the scores for everyone and averaged them {to account for people not tasting every single dish}, and we presented a few edible prizes from Trader Joe's to the winners. First place went to the Lemon Cake Pops and Lemondrop Shots-- a deserved win, since our friends shaped each pop into slices of lemon and lemon halves, and were quite disappointed to hear that we weren't scoring for presentation. Second place was the Cucumber Lime Margarita Jello Shots, but since that was one of our contributions, we passed the prize on to third place-- the Meyer Lemon-Fava Bean Bruschetta with Orange Slaw (my personal favorite of the evening).

Interested in throwing an Iron Chef party of your own? Here are a few of my tips/notes:
- Potluck or family style works really well. I've heard of other Iron Chef parties where two competitors cook for all dinner guests on the spot, but that seems too stressful and requires much more space than we have in our kitchen.
- Planning a detailed/involved party within two weeks before Christmas is not the smartest idea. If we do it again, we'll aim for April or May.
- People love competition! Even the non-foodies got into it because they wanted the glory of winning.
- It's fun to have everyone introduce their own dishes as they get passed around the table-- bonus points for pretentious titles and descriptions!
- We were worried about the meal being entirely too acidic from all of that citrus, but we found that it all balanced out really well and had a lot of variety. Only the drinks were really in-your-face with citrus flavors.
- Other great ingredients for an Iron Chef party might be: some kind of alcohol (red wine, spiced rum, etc), an herb like basil, chocolate, or anything else that can be used in savory and sweet applications.
- I got a few questions about the invitations. I used this tutorial to make the silver scratch-off portion.

Have you ever been to a themed dinner party before? I'd love to hear about it, since we definitely plan on doing it again!