Appetizer Night!

While I was visiting my best friend Julie over Christmas, she and I decided it would be a lot of fun to have an appetizer night. Basically we ate only finger-foods for dinner that night. We discovered that making a bunch of appetizers is a lot more time-consuming than we originally thought, not to mention a lot of work! But, it was a lot of fun for us and Alysha to make all of these appetizers. Not to mention how fun it was to eat them! Even Jon enjoyed the food, even though it was girlie :).

Our menu:

• Ham and cheese mini frittatas
• Beef and onion cheeseball with crackers
• Confetti pinwheels
• Bacon-cheese mini appetizers
• BBQ cocktail smokies (not pictured)
• Chocolate-covered peanut butter crackers
• Oreo truffles
• Mini cheesecake bites

Librarians Rule!

This theme party is actually the reason I decided to begin this blog. As I will be graduating very shortly with my Masters in Library and Information Studies, and as my friend April finished hers up in May, we decided that our party before I moved away should be library-themed. My first move was to google ideas. Other than ideas from the Edible Book Festival (which is full of great ideas, by the way), I could not find anything that was more generally library-related. So, April and I were basically left to our own devices and were forced to use our imaginations. But what followed was tons of fun, and I was very pleased with the turn-out! We incorporated some ideas from the Edible Book Festival, but we made it our own as well. We tried to find books that could be applied to our dishes, but we also tried to use library-terms as well. Check out our menu, and then visit the slide show at the bottom. Once our menu was decided, I thought it would be fun to make little flags explaining each of our menu items in our table-scape (to use Sandra Lee's term). I figured this way we could even get a little bit of an education in some form or another :).

• Dewey Decimal vegetable Soup Ahoy!
• Leaves of text salad with Grape tomatoes of Wrath
• Here Lies the Librarian buns
• I am the Cheese cubes
• Library stacks
• Super-fudge
• The Outsiders' Sodapop Curtis beverage

*The text in our "Leaves of Text" salad were cucumbers that spelled each of our names.

The Jolly Green Party

On St. Patrick's Day, several of my friends and I got together for a green-themed party. Almost all dishes had green in them, except the chicken lasagne rolls, which were added because we didn't realize the salad would have chicken in it. Here is our menu and a picture:

• Chicken lasagne rollups
• Salad with marinated chicken
• Green grapes and other fruit with fruit dip
• Green beans with bacon and almonds
• Mint brownies
• Green-tinted oreo truffles

In the Pink

In honor of Valentine's Day, my friend April, her daughter Courtney, and I had a pink party. Our original plan had been to have only pink or red foods. However, we discovered that red food coloring could work wonders! In the end, our menu consisted of:

• Pink mashed potato pie
• Pink macaroni and cheese
• Pink onion dip with chips
• Pink m&ms
• Cherry and cheesecake Hershey Kisses
  
• Oreo truffles in pink, white, and black
• Cherry coke
• Sunrise punch

I will admit that pink mashed potatoes messed a little bit with our minds, because it looked more like pink frosting. But it was all delicious. Below is a picture. Click on it to view it larger in photobucket.