Thursday, February 4th, 2010

We invited guest bloggers Tammy Tibbetts, Director of Operations of the MacDella Cooper Foundation, and Rachel Mount,  food blogger for bestpartoftheday.com, to shed some light on a great new party idea, the Rice Dinner.  Read on to learn about hosting your own Rice Dinner, complete with some great tips.

We’re best friends who live together on the UWS, and we live for hosting dinner parties that will lure our friends uptown. On January 24th, we set out to introduce a whole new kind of party—the Rice Dinner—and we’re hoping it catches on all over NYC.  Our low-key fundraising dinner was high-impact: our guests’ support will feed five children for one year in Liberia, West Africa.  In the process, we learned the 7 Secrets of Hosting for a Cause, which you can use for your own world-changing dinner:

1. You can charge your guests admission (when it’s for doing good).
We suggested a donation of $10 per person, and gave all proceeds to the MacDella Cooper Foundation (MCF), which can feed a child in Liberia for $100 a year.  Some people donated even more, because really, when do you ever spend just $10 on a night dining out in NYC?  We left an empty Rice Krispies box at the door for guests to drop donations in.  We collected just over $400, and some post-dinner donations from absent friends brought the grand total to $500+!

2. Cook rice because it’s cheap, easy, and meaningful to the cause.
We chose to cook rice for dinner because it’s a staple of the Liberian diet.  We loved that there would be a direct connection between what our guests were enjoying and what they were funding for needy children.  We fed 40+ friends and the grocery bill was only $80.  We prepared a cold Asian noodle salad, a hot pot of rice and beans, and ended things on a very happy note with creamy rice pudding.  Salivate over it on bestpartoftheday.com.

3. Your plates don’t have to match.
We put out every plate, glass, wine glass, and piece of silverware we had, even though none of it matched–we wanted our entertaining to be as eco-friendly as possible and minimized the need for disposable plates.

4. Shop early at Whole Foods.
Thank goodness for the new Whole Foods a few blocks away from us on 97th and Columbus.  We only wish we thought to shop a little earlier, so we could have scheduled (cheap!) delivery of our grocery bags in time (there’s a four-hour delivery window).

5. Rearrange your furniture.
There wasn’t seating for everyone, but with rice, it’s easy to eat standing and mingling.  We used our table as a serving station and moved it in front of the kitchen entrance, to create a clear area for last-minute cooking.

6. You can butcher a recipe and it can still be the hit of the party.
We had to multiply our ingredients by 12 to feed our 40+ RSVP’d guests, which meant that for our rice pudding recipe, we should have poured in two gallons of milk.  But only one gallon fit in the pot.  Oops.  And then we forgot to add the cream at the last minute.  But it was still sweet, creamy, and yummy and guests insisted on getting the recipe!

7. Inspire guests to replicate your dinner party!
We had handouts explaining the feeding program worked and how you could host your own Rice Dinner.  Friends are already planning their own, whether they’re inviting 40 guests or just four.  On macdellacooper.org, each Rice Dinner will be featured and a tally kept until we reach 100 children fed, or $10,000 raised.  Join us, neighbors!

Filed under: Food & Drink, Upper West Side, Upper West Side Blog