We’ve talked about hosting parties and cooking both briefly before, but it was time to dig a little bit more into the idea of theme-ing your food with a movie, event, or other nerdy bit of business. Food and drink is something that people can really get behind, and creating the right foods for a certain event can enhance the experience. While having pizza and popcorn while watching A&E’s Pride and Predjudice is going to be a fun time, having tea, cucumber sandwiches and short bread cookies is going to get much closer to matching the feel of the movie, and help keep you in more of a mindset for the movie.

So, as an exercise in insanity, I’m going to come up with menus/ideas for three different events that nerds get together around, and how to create an appetizer, main course, dessert, and drink(s) for them. I’m going to intentionally shoot for things that are a little bit out of the norm, as people can probably come up with an old fashioned meal for Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, or do a sweet “fish finger” (finger cookie) and custard for Doctor Who, but what do you do when you want to show a lesser known film or show? I’m picking on idea to start, but I would love suggestions over on the Facebook page (search for Nerdologists) for the next two.

Arkham Horror

This is going to be a very challenging one to start off with, a couple of things jumped out at me right away.

Drinks:

Old Fashioned & Martini

Root Beer

These are a couple of classic drinks that can take you back to the turn of the century when Lovecraft was writing his works. If you’re a skeezy private eye who is tracking down some weird goings on, you drink an Old Fashioned at the bar in the evening after a long day on your feet. The Martini works well for that time period and gives you a bit of that dangerous feel thanks to James Bond. I don’t think it makes much of a difference if you use Gin or Vodka for your Martini as both will give the desired visual affect which is what you are going for.

Root Beer is for the part of your group that might not drink or may not be old enough to drink yet. It’s one of those old time drinks that makes a lot of sense, and you can even turn it into you dessert and do root beer floats if you want.

Appetizer:

Peanuts in the shell

To me this kind of keeps that old time feel going. There is something about shelling peanuts, while it is messy, that brings in a classic stake out, something to do with your hands while you are watching for something strange to happen.

Main Course:

Corn Chowder and biscuits

You could also go with a seafood chowder here, but a creamy corn and potato chowder seems to go well with the theme. Arkham being based off of Danvers, MA would have had different types of chowder and the biscuits would give it a nice rounded feel to the meal, more so just than the soup. If you think that the people who are showing up would all like clams, I would recommend doing a clam chowder instead of corn, but corn chowder is probably safer for most peoples taste buds.

Dessert:

Cranberry Apple Crisp

This keeps with your New England area theme, any desert with cranberries would be pretty typical. The reason for doing a crisp is that you can make it gluten free if you desire, so it’s safer to serve everyone. Also, New England has plenty of apples of their own, and crisps, to me, have that more classic dessert that would have been more common from that time.

So there you have it, an idea for more fun foods to eat to keep the mindset of 1900’s Massachusetts in a Lovecraft world, what would you do?

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