French onion soup, complete with Gruyere cheese and sliced baguette…bread pudding with artichokes and spinach, and three kinds of gourmet bread…made-from-scratch, hand-rolled butternut squash ravioli with an intense, buttery mushroom-cranberry sauce…and home-made oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

That was the menu for my son’s “savory sixteen” birthday party. He, his older sister, and three friends spent a whole afternoon cooking, and then served us (and themselves) a fabulous repast, on our good china, complete with cloth napkins.

The ingeredients cost about $100 (certianly less than seven people going to a fancy restaurant) and we have tons of leftovers, incuding a full casserole’s worth of bread pudding (they made two).

And he and his friends had a great time! They got to be creative, to explore their passion for food, to step out of the usual 20 dishes that we all have in our repertoire, and to hang out with friends. Some of the kids are still talking about it two weeks later.

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