About

The Broke and Chic Project is a website for people who like to have their friends over for dinner every once in a while. It’s also a collection of ideas about creating, organizing and throwing a truly superb dinner on a drastically, or semi-drastically, reduced budget. When it comes to a fabulous dinner party, money is truly no object. Throughout history, whenever people memorably broke bread together, they generally just did that: broke bread.

So even though throwing a dinner party feels extravagant, we think that particular extravagance is emotional, not financial. When you’re in a generous mood, inspired to entertain, out come the cookbooks and magazines, and out go the hurried emails to friends: What can I make for 6 – 12 – 18 – 40 people? What’s the most delicious food ever? What can I make the day ahead? What if half the party is vegetarian? Vegan?

Here at The Broke and Chic Project we will be thinking about menus, trying them out, interviewing our favorite hosts and hostesses about their most (and least) liked things about dinner parties, inventing dishes and shortcuts and smartcuts and figuring out how to cook for both a lot of people and six –– MFK Fisher’s Ideal.

Sharing food is an intense and elemental gesture. We are saying so much when we ask people into our houses to share  food. Eating together is a tribal gesture to be sure; throwing a dinner party is more than just a social gesture.  It’s a way of engaging with the world, of saying come sit by my fire, share my roast, solve our own problems and the world’s. Dinner parties are a cure for what ails us on the long dark nights of the soul.

So come on in! Sign up for subscription.

Questions? email me: brokeandchic(at)gmail(dot)com

“In preparing food for consumption, by symbolic understanding of the ritual character of eating, and by the evolution of table manners, we have crossed over from the wild to the tame, from nature to culture.”       — Claude Levi-Strauss