In this episode, we’re going to be talking about more ways to make your dining table special. Last time I mentioned five things. We talked about underplates – decorative underplates, maybe gold colored, or clear plastic with gold edging. You get all kinds of them. We talked about lighting on the table, and twinkle lights above the table. I mentioned folded, decorative napkins to place on the main plate or next to the plate. Then we talked about personalized place names or messages for each person, and music for ambience. If you want to listen more in detail, it’s episode 3 in which I talk about those things.
So, for today, let’s consider more ways to make a dining table special for a meal. We’ve mentioned underplates and napkins folded decoratively for the table, but we haven’t really talked about the full spectrum of elegant tableware. That’s really the foundation for decorating your table.
I love to use silver, white, or off white tablecloths. You can add a whole lot of different things to these, and they can complement your napkins and your underplates. And then perhaps white plates are the best for putting on top of those things, as they work with the most diverse selection of decorations. It’s also beautiful to have a white tablecloth with a gold overlay along the length of the table, or two tablecloths widthwise, or perhaps just a triangular piece of cloth in the middle of the table over the original tablecloth. Mixing and matching all of those things is very elegant.
So, we lay the table, possibly with a runner, and then the underplates, then all the plates and other crockery, and then candles, as we’ve mentioned, whether you like to use real candles, battery operated candles, or beeswax candles. Then you can add any kind of greenery. Something that’s really beautiful is a centerpiece with fresh flowers. You can just put a simple vase of flowers, or you can use a flower arranging piece in which you stick the flowers and the other greenery, things like ivy, anything that looks nice. So, those really add something special.
Even sometimes mats, hard mats, decorated mats, or soft mats, perhaps even instead of the tablecloth, if you have a beautiful wooden or glass table that you want to show off, just putting simple mats on it can look beautiful.
The more different things that you put together, I think, the better the end result, as long as they are coordinated and kind of match each other. I love to put different shapes of things like a decorative ball, or maybe a tall silver candlestick with a candle on top. Another nice thing to use is inverted or upside down glasses. Take a wine glass with a stem and turn it upside down. Then you can put something inside the main part of the glass, maybe a flower like a rose, or a pine cone or some pretty leaves. The roundness of the glass kind of magnifies that. Then on the top, which is actually the base of the glass when it’s inverted, is a lovely place to stand a candle. Candles on top of glasses are a lovely way to make the table look special.
You can also give each person more than one glass. Obviously, doing this every day would mean a lot more washing up, so we don’t want to do that. But for special meals, we like to have more than one glass – perhaps one for water and one for your drink. Different heights of glasses look stunning, like a tall glass plus a lower glass; two different shapes – that really looks very beautiful. It’s also cute to add elegant salt shakers, or perhaps olive oil and balsamic vinegar in jars, the kind of things you use often.
If you’re not doing napkin folding for a particular meal, you can have an elegant napkin holder on the table, or pretty napkin rings. You can even make some of these. The kids can get involved if they’d like to make elegant napkin holders, but you can also just have individual napkin rings, one for each person. If you use cloth napkins regularly then it’s easy to know whose is whose. We’ve got some old napkin rings inherited from grandparents which have the dates engraved on them and the initials or the names on the silver – very elegant. All these personal touches make things extra special, and you can make them just the way that you like them.
Sometimes, for a special meal, we could put photo frames on the table showing people that we are celebrating or remembering. Then there’s also seasonal decor, which would be relevant to the particular season you’re in. If it’s fall, then little pumpkins and pumpkin patch leaves, anything that matches with what you like to do in that season. Springtime would be blossoms; lots of fresh flowers, lots of color. Summer may be bright yellow themed with sunflowers. Winter may be muted tones with more greenery.
I love to use the different things that I keep in our, what we call our sideboard. And so in there, we’ve got strings of fairy lights, and we’ve got the jars with fairy lights inside that light up. We’ve got the different kinds of colored candles that we use – battery powered candles, as I’ve mentioned before. We’ve got different candle holders, and different long candles, dinner candles, which often I’ll put up as a decoration without lighting them. Then they’ll last, and the toxic fumes from the candle are not what we want, but the beautiful dinner candles are always lovely. We’ve got different kinds of candle holders, some with little flowers.
We’ve got different shapes of little bowls and things that can go in the middle part of the table, not for the individuals. For example, a winding bowl that we put olives and nuts in, or a bowl that’s sectioned into three different heart shapes that we can put dips and sauces in.
Your serving spoons and forks and things can also be decorative, and can go on the table, or perhaps on a side tray. And then, of course, there’s your cutlery. I’ve mentioned gold knives and forks that we love to use. All of those things can make a beautiful difference. So, sometimes we’ll use the gold cutlery. Sometimes we’ll use the decorated silver cutlery. Sometimes we’ll use Chinese style implements like chopsticks, black chopsticks, and maybe white Chinese soup spoons. Those are unique. For a fondue, we would use fondue forks. For a steak or a meal of ribs, we would use steak knives. I love to have these things, to collect these things and to ask for them as birthday gifts, to just expand my repertoire of creative things for the table.
So, sometimes you’re feeling tired, and not into cooking, but you still want to do a special meal. Then you can definitely make it more special with the table setting. So, say we’re getting Chinese takeout. Then you can serve it in courses, and use beautiful things on the table. Maybe you can have soup bowls for a Chinese noodle soup or a corn soup, and then side plates for some sushi, and some chopsticks for the sweet and sour chicken with rice. Then, when the table’s set, have the meal in a relaxed mood, using the Chinese style implements and eating it slowly in courses. This helps it to become a much more special time, and a time when you can connect as a family, and when mom and dad can really relax and unwind. It’s a slow meal and it’s not rushed at all. You can do the same thing with a different kind of takeout. Perhaps you can order things again that you can use in different courses, like you can start with the vegetables, and then you can have the main – the steak, and then a little dessert. This is great. It’s not a huge amount of work for mom or dad, but still a delicious and uplifting meal and time together.
Something else that’s fun to do now and then is to have sorbet between the starter and the main course, like in a fancy restaurant. You just need to find some tiny cups, and grab some sorbet from the freezer. Lemon, orange, lychee, or mango sorbet are delicious. Then just serve everybody a little bit of it along with an elegant teaspoon. One of your children can carry the tray around and hand out the sorbet, and it truly does cleanse the palate for the next course, and makes it even more delicious.
Another fun thing to do is to put an elegant little chocolate at each place setting, or even around Christmas time you can use British crackers, which are the crackers that you pull and they make a bang. It’s lovely to have those on the table, and sometimes at each place. Sometimes you can get really tiny ones that are extra fun to put around at the dinner table, and they look so elegant.
By the way, when I say underplates, those are also known as chargers – the different colors of plates that you can put under your dinner plate as an extra layer. Something else that looks lovely is to use silver or white platters in the middle of the table to serve the food from using elegant serving spoons. It’s always tempting for me to just leave all the food in its container in the kitchen and have people serve themselves from there, but sometimes it’s lovely to put things on the table. The other thing that works well on the table is a charcuterie board. If you have a big wooden board on which you can place a whole lot of cold meats, cheeses, olives, and fruit, that’s also a big hit, and it looks lovely on the table.
Sometimes, it’s possible to deconstruct your dinner; perhaps you’re having burgers, but you want it to look elegant, so then you can lay the different parts on platters, the burger patties on one, on another slices of tomato, cucumber, cheese slices, and then different sauces in elegant bowls or plates – anything that looks good on the table.
It’s lovely to have a color palette for the table, made up of coordinated colors like red and silver, green and gold, or whatever works for you; what you love. You must do what you love.
It also looks beautiful to use little glass bowls or something elegant like that for the starter, and you can have that out already at the beginning. So, say you have a charger plate or underplate, then you have a white dinner plate, then you have a napkin folded in an elegant way, and on top of that you would have a little glass bowl with perhaps shrimp cocktail or slices of melon in it – something that adds to the beauty and that’s ready to eat.
When you’re doing your centerpiece and you have flowers, you can also complement it by adding flowers to the napkins on the plates. So perhaps you have your dinner plate, and then your side plate on top of that with an elegant napkin decoration, with thyme or some rosemary and a little flower inserted into the napkin. Perhaps your main tablecloth and your plates are white, then you can add pops of color with a few berries, or a few pretty flowers inside or next to each place setting.
As for the napkins, you can really do so much with them besides folding them. Sometimes we’ll fold them into a rose or a shirt, like we mentioned in a previous episode. By the way, you can see the videos of how to fold those on our website, which is familyfoodformoms.com. You can watch them in the blog post for episode number three.
But, also, what you can do with your napkins is to simply roll them up, and insert them in your glasses. This gives you a nice height difference and the different levels always make the table look so good. Or you can simply drape the napkin from underneath the bowl or the side plate down over the edge of the table. That will look lovely, especially if it’s a different color.
Check out some elegant and fun ways to fold your Napkins here on our YouTube Channel
And then, lastly, something that’s a very different mood to what we’ve been speaking about, all the elegance, is something really fun – to, instead of using a tablecloth, cover the table with brown paper or white craft paper, and then give each guest a couple of colored crayons or markers that they can draw and write with. Then people can write quotes, they can write poetry, they can draw, they can play noughts and crosses with their neighbors and just go wild, making fun drawings, cartoon style, or anything really. Sometimes you can do a more elegant one where everybody draws flowers and roses and writes poetry. It’s such a good way to relax together, to make the dinnertime memorable, and to form good family connections while you eat.
I know we live in a time when there’s high inflation and food prices are just crazy expensive. And it’s also a season in a mom’s life where it’s extra hectic when our children are at home. Maybe we homeschool, or we take our kids to school and back, and there’s never much time. And so it’s easy to dismiss these things and think, well, I don’t have the time or that I don’t have the money. Okay. But I think that’s all the more reason to celebrate life and to do these things, because it brings us such joy and family closeness. It helps us as mums to really be refreshed in the evenings, and the whole family can be refreshed through these kinds of events. The decorating doesn’t need to be expensive. As I said, you collect things over time, perhaps as birthday gifts, but also you can just use simple things, whatever you can find from your garden can really be lovely. So, this is just to encourage you to try and do it in a way that fits in with you in the season of life that you’re in.
I also want to mention my Family Food for Moms book that will be coming out, not for a while, but in about six months. It’s going to have all of these kinds of articles in it with lots of beautiful pictures and ideas for how you can do everything from family fun nights to elegant meals to many of the things that we’ve talked about on the podcast.
So, that’s all for today. Thank you for listening. See you next time.
