Bizarro Meal #2 ❄️🛷🎿🥘🧁
Bizarro Meal #2 ❄️🛷🎿🥘🧁
Dinner and Dessert in a Winter Wonderland
If you were a subscriber in early December, you know that I tried to create my first “Bizarro Meal” in December 2021 after I completed a class called “The Table as Canvas: Designing a Bizarro Dinner Party” through Atlas Obscura. The idea behind a bizarro meal is that it should be surprising as well as an experience. In the 4-week class, I learned how to use themes, color, lighting, music, and props to enhance (or combine with) the food. For that first event, I picked the movie Elf as a theme. For my second attempt just a few weeks ago, I decided to create a Christmas meal with a Winter Wonderland theme. I love the outdoors even if it’s 5 degrees(F), so I was looking for ways to combine sports items with a dinner buffet and dessert. Since the beginning of 2022, I had been hunting for a sled because I thought it would be fun to serve food on it. I was also looking for a pair of old wooden skis. This ended up being much harder than I expected since I didn’t want to buy anything new. Finally, last summer, a local church had a rummage sale, and hidden in the corner behind a collection of old golf clubs was a fantastic wooden toboggan. Better yet, it was only $10!
I got close to finding the skis on Ebay a few times, but all involved local pick-up, and none of the pick-up spots were a close enough drive. A friend finally found an old wooden set of vintage skis that even came with bamboo poles and passed them on to me.
In addition to these two main props, I moved some outdoor white snowflake lighting indoors. I was able to recycle some of the items from last year, like white styrofoam trees and a sheer table runner with white lights. My children tried to build gingerbread houses again but tried to keep the all-white theme which was not easy. You can see the gingerbread houses in the dessert table photo.
We decided to prop up the toboggan so that it looked like it was going down a hill, but since the toboggan was being used to hold the main dishes, this was a little risky. Luckily the toboggan has natural dividers, and these worked perfectly to stop the food from sliding down to the bottom:)
I decided to set up an extra table in a different room for the dessert because I wanted to incorporate the skis somehow. After much trial and error, I ended up using the skis to hold cupcakes. Since most people who came to my house that day brought some kind of dessert with them, it was great to have a lot of space to use.
I have already decided on next year’s theme - Winter Forest. I want to incorporate things to do with forests and trees like tree stumps, pinecones, greens, and branches. I just started thinking of ideas for next year but I am excited to have just found short tree stumps in a friend’s backyard that I will use as stands for food and I’ve collected a big bag of pinecones and need to think about what to do with them. If you have any ideas to share (for the pinecones or anything else) please pass them along. I have at least 11 months to get ready for next year!
Try to create a meal where everything is the same exact color or have a theme for dinner and try to serve food on something other than pieces usually used to serve food.
The Bizarro Dinner course on Atlas Obscura
“Incredible Food Designs That Will Surprise You” on YouTube (I didn’t link to this because the video would attach to this email but if you search the title, you will easily find it).
