Liz Bolton, event planner and in-house caterer for Balzac's Coffee House and co-owner of Pantry Fine Food, let the Bargain Brunchers in on how she would host a Thai potluck to remember.

1.    Ask everybody to bring a different dish and have them RSVP with that dish. Say that you will supply the backdrop, the limes and the rice.
2.  Prepare the rice. “To supply good Thai rice is not that easy,” Bolton says. “It’s not just boiled rice.” Ask each guest to bring something that will go with Thai rice. Serve 20 cups of cooked rice (five-10 cups of uncooked rice) to feed 10 people. She recommends seasoning it with sushi vinegar. Be sure to check out a website like the Thai Kitchen for tips on how to prepare, rinse and cook Thai rice. Also cut up a few limes for guests to squeeze onto their food.
3.    Make a signature drink. Or two. For example, there’s a Thai iced coffee, which is just condensed milk and really thickly brewed coffee. “It’s like Turkish coffee with condensed milk,” Bolton says. She would also make a watermelon drink or something with blood oranges to mimic Thai colours. Use cheap umbrellas that look kind of kitschy, but reflect the theme.
4.    Get your guests to potluck the booze, too. “As far as alcohol, have everybody bring something that will go well with the meal,” Bolton says. (Check out fellow Bargain Bruncher Kirsty’s guide to pairing wine on a dime.)
5.    Do some very simple décor. “The good thing about doing a Thai or any kind of Asian-themed party is that it is fairly inexpensive to do some kind of décor that’s fun,” Bolton says. Go to Chinatown for some little gold pagodas, paper lanterns and simple tablecloths in bright colours like fuchsias, pinks and reds from Asian dollar stores. “As far as flowers go, I wouldn’t do floral arrangements,” she says. “There’s something called TP, which is like a palm leaf. It’s quite tall, so you could get tall glass vases. They’re about $10-15 so get two of those and use them as centre pieces and put the greenery in them.”
6.    Use one table, like a big, wooden harvest table, Bolton recommends. Decorate the table with some brightly coloured saris or tablecloths. Place all the food down the centre of the table. Put the big pot of rice in the middle. “Everybody’s dish can accompany the rice because rice really is a mainstay of any Asian diet,” she says.
7.    Serve food on banana leaves. Bolton says there is a store at Avenue Road and Davenport that sells them.
8.    Decorate your space. “I had a Chinese New Year party and rented Godzilla and kung-fu movies and I had all these TVs stacked on top of each other playing the movies all night, which was fun,” Bolton says. Hook up your computer or a projector to project random images onto a blank wall. Wire into Flickr, put in the word Thai, and have a constant stream of photographs related to Thailand as a backdrop or a point of interest throughout the evening. “People can comment on the pictures and it engages them in conversation because you don’t know what’s going to come up,” Bolton says. “It could be somebody vomiting Thai food or it could be a huge Buddha in Thailand.”