Wavy Pop-Up Dinner

For our latest pop-up dinner, we decided to picnic at a little visited Ann Arbor landmark, The Wave Field on the University of Michigan's North Campus. Designed by artist Maya Lin, who also designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., the rolling mounds of grass are nestled between campus building that provided the perfect amount of shade on a warm summer day. 

We wanted this dinner to welcome summer and the fun that the season brings with it. Pop-up dinners are really just fancy picnics, and we embraced that vibe with our choices for the meal. We stuck with simple picnic fare but amped it up with nice linens, place settings, tables, and chairs.

We started with several summery drinks, including honey lemonade, a rhubarb shrub, and lime and ginger. Drink prep was done at home and poured into glasses (and honey bears!) minutes before guests arrived.

Appetizers were simple and followed a wonderful formula: something sweet + something crunchy + something pickled + something from a pig + something aged. I picked up the meats from a fabulous Italian grocer on our way back from vacation in Pennsylvania.

We had a great time chatting about the end of the school year and summer travel plans, and I was reminded why casual happy hour conversations are always one of my favorite parts of a dinner party.

Dinner included fried chicken (that I had catered and picked up on the way to the picnic), potato salad, arugula salad with shaved parmesan and cherry tomatoes from the Farmer's Market, and homemade biscuits with honey butter. 

We had strawberry shortcakes with the last berries of the season, scored from Farmer's Market that morning, for dessert, and sipped our cold drinks until the sun went down. At a little before 10:00 everyone pitched in to clean up and tote everything back to the cars, and with everyone's efforts it took less than 10 minutes. 

As happy texts flew back and forth on the way home, we all agreed that the picturesque setting and tasty comfort food was made all the better by the good friends we enjoyed it with. Cheers to good friends who make every get-together a special occasion.