Supper Club - Carolina Charm

February was my month for hosting Supper Club! Last Thursday we had 9 girls around my dining room table chowing down on tacos, passing many bottles of wine late into the night and laughing until our full bellies hurt. Such good memories were made with truly amazing friends. I am so lucky.

On Wednesday I began my Supper Club preparations. I set the table, prepped as much of the food as possible, cleaned the house and hid all of the baby stuff to get ready. Our dinner date happened to land just a few days after Valentine’s Day so I was able to score 4 bouquets of flowers on sale for $4 each (originally $16 each) for my dining table.

One of the most important things to me about hosting guests is not being stuck in the kitchen cooking and cleaning, but instead actually enjoying my party! So to keep things simple and to make for easy clean up I ordered my favorite disposable plates and disposable forks a few days beforehand from Amazon. I already had everything else on hand from previous dinner parties so the tablescape was a breeze.

The rule for Supper Club is the hostess prepares all the food – appetizers, dinner and dessert. Everyone else brings a bottle of wine. And even though 1/3 of the girls in attendance were pregnant, we still managed to go through a ton of wine!

For the appetizers I set out chips, salsa, guacamole and queso. I made a pound of queso and by the end of the night it was completely gone. The recipe was super simple and delicious. In a small crockpot I melted a large block of Velveeta cheese with two (undrained) cans of Rotel. Once it was melted and well combined I just kept the crockpot on the warm setting and it was good all night!

For dinner I prepared a taco bar. Who doesn’t love tacos? Our taco bar included crockpot chicken (recipe), ground beef, black beans, corn, lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese and sour cream.

For dessert I made the yummiest individual Strawberry Shortcakes. These were easy to prepare ahead of time and also looked pretty. Oh, and they were tasty — very, very tasty.

For the Strawberry Shortcakes I cubed a cream cheese pound cake (from the freezer section), added some diced strawberries (tossed in turbinado sugar), topped with whipped cream and repeated the layers to fill the glass.