When creating a menu, consider the following:

Do your guests have any allergies? Any dislikes?

What are you comfortable cooking?

How much time do you have to dedicate to preparing food and cooking?

Do you want to make dessert?

We knew that we had a few gluten-sensitive guests, so we planned to make a majority of our food gluten-free. As mediocre chefs, we felt pretty comfortable in the kitchen, and had tried most of the recipes we wanted to create for this BBQ party in advance, so we felt confident in serving them to our guests. In terms of time… well, we kind of failed planning that. Because our menu was way too large, we spent a lot of time cooking (more on that below). Learn from our mistake: plan a smaller menu and make more of each dish, instead of making too many items.

As you can see by our menu, we didn’t have a standard BBQ party — there were no burgers, hot dogs, or crappy store-bought potato salad. To make your BBQ party stand out, make your dishes from scratch! Need ideas? Take inspiration from food blogs (like the one you’re currently reading *cough* *cough*), Tasty videos, whatever — have one or two items on your menu that are unique.

🍖 Mediocre Tip: Want to copy our menu? Keep on reading — we link (almost) all of the recipes we used later on in this post! P.S. - You’re crazy.

Step 3: Estimate Cost & Buy Ingredients

So you know how many people will be attending and what you want to cook. Now you need to price everything out. We aren’t going to lie, this is going to take a bit of work. Break down the ingredients for all your recipes into two categories: stuff you already have and stuff you need to buy.

For the stuff you need to buy, head out to your grocery store and start writing down prices. Either take a picture, or (if you’re like Trevor and are secretly an old man trapped in a young person’s body) grab a notepad and a pen and physically write the prices down. Once you’ve done your field work, head home and start crunching the numbers. This rough estimate should give you a good idea of what kind of costs to expect. If you're pretty confident that you can make a solid estimate, you can skip this step.

Now comes the tough part: do you charge your guests an entry fee? There are definite pros and cons to doing this. We opted for a $10 per person fee in order to help offset the cost of the party. If you’ve got money to burn, by all means, don’t charge people. But we’re two young millenials in a terrible economy — we need to save as much money as possible.