How to Throw a Vegan Dinner Party in 7 Easy Steps

What's the best thing you can do with vegan food? You share it! I love sharing the food I make - especially with people who are not vegan. It's just always so rewarding to see their reaction: "Oh, this tastes really good. It doesn't even taste like i'ts vegan." or "How did you make it? Can I have the recipe?". It makes me really happy every time to show people how easy and tasy vegan food can be.

Planning a Vegan Dinner Party for My Birthday

Earlier this year, it was my birthday and I decided to prepare some vegan food for my family. My family doesn't live vegan or vegetarian, although they eat quite healthy and prepare most food themselves - apart from the occasional deep-frozen pizza. My grandma eats mostly vegetarian since a couple years but has become quite sensitive to unfamiliar spices.

After some thought, I decided to make a vegan buffet so I could cook different recipes and everyone could choose what they liked. Also, I could prepare most of it the night before so I could spend time with my family while they visited instead of standing in the kitchen.

7 Easy Steps to Plan a Vegan Dinner Party

My family really enjoyed the vegan buffet that I prepared. Although, as usual, I made waaaay to much food. But what I enjoyed even more was that I stayed below 20€ for the whole buffet. I did some re-engineering and created a 7-step guide how you can plan a vegan dinner party that your friends and family will love and that wont ruin your account balance.

Step 1: Define the Parameters and Your Budget

Before you run to the supermarkt or even start thinking about any recipes, you should first define the parameters of your vegan dinner party. Yes, that might sound a little overkill, treating your party like a super complicated project. But if you don't want your grocery bill to skyrocket - and I'm confident you don't - you need to consider this. Plus, it shoudn't take you very long because most of this you already know - it's just about actively becoming aware of it.

Guests: Think about who is joing you for your vegan dinner party. Are you inviting someone who is not familiar with the vegan diet? Then I would go for some simple vegan variations of classic dishes such as potato salads, noodle salads, burgers or mini pizzas. If you have friends over who are more accustomed to vegan food or even vegetarian or vegan themselves, you can be a little more adventurous.
Number of guests: You should also consider how many people you are inviting for your vegan dinner party. This obviously influences how much food you need to cook but also how many different dishes you can serve.
Budget: What is your budget? This might depend on the number of people you are inviting or on the occasion. Anyways, it's important to have a clear budget to keep in mind when you decide on your menu.

My budget was 20€ for 6 people, although in hindsight the buffet was probably enough for 8 people.

Step 2: Choose One or Two Star Ingredients

This step is crucial if you want to stay within your budget. Choose one or two "star ingredients". These are ingredients that are typically a little more expensive but really make a dish stand out. Some examples are avocado, walnuts, raisins, mango, tempeh, cashews, fresh berries, figs, olives...

Think about which one or two ingredients you want to feature in your dishes. Preferably choose ingredients that you can use for several dishes. You could use mango to make a curry and also add some chunks to a couscous dish. Cashews can be used to make a creamy cheese sauce and to add some crunch to a salad. Try to get as much out of your star ingredient(s) as possible.

My star ingredients were cranberries and almonds. I used them in my freshly baked bread and then I also added the cranberries to a couscous salad and used the almonds to make a vegan mayo.

Step 3: Build Meals Around Your Star Ingredients

Once you have your star ingredients all set, you can start building meals around them. First, decide what recipes you want to cook that use your star ingredients. Then, look at the remaining ingredients in these recipes and think about other meals you can use them in.

Maybe your star ingredient is raisins and you want to make an oriental-inspired chickpea couscous salad with raisins. But what other things can you make with chickpeas and couscous? You could make hummus using the chickpeas. You could also cook another couscous salad but this time mediterranean-inspired with olives and tomatoes. Or you could combine both and make some falafel-couscous balls.

These were my meals: freshly baked bread with cranberries and almonds, empanadas with a potato-lentil filling, cucumber orange salad, hummus (plain and with eggplant), lentil orange salad, couscous with cranberries, potato salad, grilled vegetables.

Step 4: Use Whole-Food Ingredients

Another trick to keep your costs low is to use whole-food ingredients instead of processed ingredients. When you're planning your menu and come across processed ingredients, think: Can I make this myself?

Okay, sometimes it will be more convenient to buy ready-made ingredients - if you're using puff pastry for example. But most times you're better of making things from scratch. Hummus, salsa, marinara sauce, salad dressings - these are all things you can easily make yourself.

I only used sunflower oil as a processed ingredient. All my other ingredients where whole-food based: flour, oats, yeast, cranberries, almonds, potatoes, lentils, onions, garlic, cucumber, orange, chickpeas, lemon, lime, eggplant, lettuce, couscous, spring onions and peppers.

Step 5: Be flexible

When I planned my birthday buffet, I really wanted to make a potato salad. Therefore, I needed to make a vegan mayo which required cashews. Unfortunately, cashews were too expensive for my budget of 20€. I couldn't just spend a fifth of that for one food item. So I decided to swap the cashews for almonds which are far cheaper but behave similarly.

If you are finding that you're over budget, you might be able to swap some ingredients out for cheaper ones. Almonds for Cashews. Rice for Quinoa. Raisins for Cranberries. Or you can leave certain ingredients out if they don't make that much of a difference.

I would have loved to add some tahini to the hummus I made, but it was just too expensive. Yes, the tahini would have made it a little creamier, but I thought it was fine without it, too.

Step 6: Plan Your Grocery Shopping to Stay in Budget

Once you have your ingredient list finalized, don't go grocery shopping just yet. What I like to do is compare prices for certain grocery items online first. Some supermarkets have launched their own online grocery shopping services so it's really easy to compare prices. If you can't find prices on the supermarket's homepage, try looking for websites that compare different supermarkets.

I wrote two shopping lists, one for a regular supermarket and one for a discount supermarket. I mainly got all my fruits and vegetables at the discounter except for the oranges which were cheaper at the regular supermarket.

Step 7: Think Ahead

You have successfully planned the menu for your vegan dinner party and you've also bought the ingredients all while staying in budget. Congratulations! Now there's just one step left - to actually cook the delicious food.

Make yourself a list of all the meals you want to prepare. If you're making a buffet, these might be identical to the dishes you are serving. But you can also go into more detail. If you're making a potato salad, you would need to make the vegan mayo first, cook the potatoes and then combine the ingredients.

In the next step, divide your list into things you can prepare the day before and things you need to make fresh. The more you can prepare beforehand, the better, although some dishes might actually taste better if they're fresh.

One of my dishes was an almond and cranberry bread. I knew it would taste a lot better if I baked it fresh on the day we were going to eat it. But I also knew it would need quite a lot of time to knead the dough, let it rise, bake the bread and let it cool. So that was the first thing I did in the morning.

I hope this guide "How to Throw a Vegan Dinner Party in 7 Easy Steps" is helpful to you and I would love to hear what awesome menu creations you come up with. Let me know in the comments below or tag me on instagram @sarahsveganguide! Here is some inspiration that might help you plan your own vegan dinner party.