Harry Potter Dinner

Last Friday we hosted a Harry Potter dinner at our house for a small group of friends. It was a blast!

DECORATIONS
To create a Hogwarts-like ambiance, we made a few changes to our dining room:

  • We set up all of our Harry Potter books on the buffet:
  • The wands are courtesy of the incomparable (and fellow Ravenclaw) David J. Anderson.
  • We set the table with tapered candles.
  • We weren’t hardcore enough to hang candles from the ceiling, but we achieved a similar effect by using the Firestorm app for our Philips Hue smart lights. The candle setting in that app twinkles the lights in a warm glow.
  • We put out all of our owl stuff and, as we are Rice Owls ourselves, that’s a lot!
  • We even brought up the dragon drawing by R.C. Matteson from our workout room:
  • And last, but not least, we played music from the Harry Potter movie soundtracks all evening.

FOOD AND DRINK
Without house elves to help, I think we still did a pretty admirable job of preparing a Hogwarts-caliber feast:

  • We started with cocktails, including Ogden’s Old Firewhisky (Most recipes I found online added sugar, but I found just steeping whiskey with cinnamon sticks to be adequate.).
  • We also served homemade butterbeer – again using a much-less-sweet-than-prescribed recipe.
  • With cocktails we served a puree of dragon heartstring (which looked a lot like beet caviar) with an assortment of dragonsmilk cheeses.
  • Dinner was a mixed greenhouse salad, dark forest root veggies, and Professor Sprout (broccoli and gorgonzola) pie with sparkling rosé gigglewater.
  • We wrapped up with Hagrid’s berry patch cobbler a la mode (ice cream from Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour, naturally) and Starrlight mead.

FUN
Stuffed and happy, we spent the rest of the evening playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, a cooperative deck-building boardgame. It was really fun and gave us a chance to work together – instead of against each other – to defeat evil and save Hogwarts.

It was a lovely – dare I say, magical – evening and it reminded us that we need to have people over more often (if for no other reason than that it motivates us to clean the house!).

Published by Bryan Guido Hassin

These are the musings of a global entrepeneur and leader building the sustainabile, prosperous, equitable future. This blog began as a way to document my experience during the IMD MBA in Switzerland and now is the place where I publish eclectic thoughts on climatetech, business, politics, fitness, entertainment, travel, wine, sports, and . . . whatever else is top of mind.

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