Come Dine With Me – South African

Now that we had opened the gourmet can of Come Dine With Me worms, we were hooked.

Where did all those fishing analogies come from?

Anyway.

The annoying thing about starting a Come Dine With Me experience with your friends or family is that you have to finish it.  But at the same time, that’s exactly why it’s awesome.  Forcing everyone to commit to the rest of the dinners means that you make space for each other in our often too busy lives.

This weeks theme was “South African” and I wish that I could show you the menu but in my fit of giggles I forgot to take a picture of it.  It’s possibly the funniest menu I have ever seen.  But here’s to Snapchat – I managed to pull a still from it so I can share it with you…

So we were left thinking, ‘What the hell was that?” and wondering who on Earth could be our South African hero.

When the night came, we had an eclectic collection of people joining us for our dinner party.  There was…

Hashim Amla and Patricia Lewis

Charlize Theron and Trevor Noah

Julius Malema and a domestic worker

Patricia De Lille and Jack Parow

I’m almost to scared to share these – mostly because people seem to be taking offense to everything lately.  But I’m sure you know that it is just for fun and no races/people/plastic babies were harmed in the making of this evening.

We were welcomed with the delicious fish cakes and zingy tomato salsa – they were so good I almost filled my tummy on those alone!

Now, as you know, the rules of Come Dine With Me are that you are supposed to make all of the food yourself.  It may be an unspoken rule, but a rule it is.

Our Jack Parow may have broken the rules on this one and there’s a long funny story that I won’t bore you with.  The just of it is that although the food was great, it wasn’t technically made by the hands of the hosts.

Then to top it off, we had the one of my favourite South African desserts – malva pudding and custard.

For the evenings entertainment we played a round of 20 Questions where each person had a turn to think of a person, write their name down and then have everyone else ask 20 questions to try and get the right answer.  It was absolutely hilarious and a great party game.  By far the best entertainment at any of the evenings we had.

So if you’re thinking about having your own evening like this, I’ve got even more things for you to consider…

Here’s what you need to consider before starting your own Come Dine With Me evening with your friends and family:

1. You need to commit.  Thankfully we never had this problem, but it would really suck if the first couple put in all their hard work and money into a great evening and then no one else holds up their end.
2. Have some great entertainment that keeps the evening going – 30 Seconds, 20 Questions, Jenga, Twister…  The options really are endless.
3. Before you start you should lay some ground “rules”.  That way the hosts of the first night are given a fair chance.  Decide if you are all going to send out menus before the time, dress up, offer 3 courses or 2 and have “entertainment”.
4. Get an impartial person to film the end of the evening wrap ups and scores.  Or get everyone to film it on their phones and send it to one point.  Make sure you don’t cheat and look at the scores before it’s time.
5. Make it worthwhile.  Everyone should contribute a decided amount for the winners to go and enjoy a lovely dinner of their very own.  We did R100 per couple and getting R400 at the end to go and use to have a fun night out was a worthwhile prize.  In hindsight, we’d probably add runner up prizes too – everyone should walk away a winner because this is so subjective, everyone tries really hard to make the evening fun.

Like what you’ve read here?  That’s flipping awesome – feel free to share it with your friends.  Also come hang out with me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram where you can make sure you don’t miss out on the next couple of Come Dine With Me themes including Mexican (featured last week), Asian Fusion and French.