Spicy Graduation Party Food

When our daughter graduated we told her we would have a graduation party at our home. We needed to control our costs at the time and we decided we could do that better at home. We believed that the costs of the graduation party food, decorations, drinks, favors and entertainment could be kept to a reasonable amount. I also wanted to present a colourful, fun and very warm party as our daughter had done so well. Perhaps unusually we decided to start with the food we would like to offer and then work out what party theme we would have. That set the scene for the decorations, games, favors and costume. Our local curry restaurant always has a beautiful and very tasty buffet. We wanted to emulate that to some extent but realised that not all guests would eat that kind of food. So we decided to offer lots of other dishes which included Thai food, Mexican and pizza.

The party we were having at out home had 30 close family and friends coming plus another 20 to 30 casual guests coming and going in their own time. For that reason setting up a buffet did seem the perfect solution as long as we could keep the food hot and fresh. We firstly planned a team effort with our family to have chefs in charge of certain food, a small team looking after the buffet tables and also a cousin who looked after clearing up the paper plates and cups. We could not have safely kept the food hot at the buffet table. We decided to keep the amount of food on display quite small and keep topping it up.

The curry dishes were a mild curry chicken korma, a medium curry jalfrezi dish and a hot curry beef madras. The korma is generally made with mildly with cream, sugar and coconut cream. The jalfrezi dish is made with cumin seeds, ginger, capsicum pepper chopped tomatoes, and coriander leaves. The madras dish is made with But your typical madras dish will be meat cooked in a hot curry sauce, with tomatoes, lemon juice and hot chilli powder.

The spicy pizza was a cheese, tomato and chicken pizza with jalapeno peppers and a spicy sauce.

The Thai dish was Thai lime leaf chicken curry. Made with curry paste, soy sauce, coconut milk, fresh basil, fresh red chilli and shrimp past. The Mexican food was Tacos with Salsa Verde which has serrano peppers, onion, and garlic.

To balance up the spicy food we served green salad, guacamole, a choice of yoghurt and lots of fruit. We also had popadums with a spicy onion dip. The graduation party food we served was very well received. The combination of the spicy dishes and cooling dishes worked quite well. If I provided hot and spicy food again I would provide a regular dish to give the younger ones a choice. They would have loved burgers and fries.

Graduation Party Food
Lots of graduation party food ideas.