Party Food

We managed to squeeze 40-some people into our house for our springtime fiesta. This is no small feat given that our house has approximately 1150 square feet of finished space. Yes, we have a full basement, but all of the walls have scary murals on them, painted by the previous owner's (who was in her 80s when we moved in) grandfather. Yikes. Someday I'll go down there and take photos to share with you all.

I have no idea who grabbed my camera and took this pic, but my sister looks pissed.

I figured that all these people would want SOMETHING to munch on more substantial than the delicious cupcakes that Kate and I prepared. I have a tendency to go a bit overboard on party food, so this time I chose to keep it simple by just making 2 pretty easy appetizers and buying a few bags of chips.

Pioneer Woman always has crowd pleasing food, so I decided to go with her bacon wrapped jalapeno appetizers. Ben and I formed an assembly line - I chopped off the tops of the jalapenos, he seeded them, I filled them with cream cheese, and he wrapped bacon around them. I only had one of these, and it was so hot that I couldn't feel my tongue for the rest of the night. Clearly Ben had some issues with seeding :) Some of them weren't hot at all, supposedly. These all got eaten very quickly!

One little tip if you make these - don't use the same pan for both batches unless you drain the grease, or else you WILL set off your smoke alarm.

I also finally tried the "crack dip" (aka Buffalo Chicken Dip) that I'd heard about on many blogs. I only had one bite of this too, but it tasted great! Many people asked me for the recipe. I didn't get a picture, but it is in the little crockpot on the table next to me in this photo :) It was white and creamy. Actually kind of a light orange because of the buffalo sauce. NOT very pretty!

Because this was MY party, inside the keg was Miller Lite :) Thanks to Janelle for the pic!

As a special TREAT for me, Scott brought over homemade sushi! This was quite a feat for him, as he had SUCH a busy day that Saturday! His in-laws came over for brunch at noon, and then he came to our party that night. Wow! How exhausting ;) Thankfully, he found time to make all this and bring it over! I think there was spicy tuna, crabcake rolls, and some sort of cream cheese and something or other roll. The ones I had were deeeeee lish.

Canvases

As I mentioned a few times, a party is great motivation to get things done for us, since apparently we lack any internal motivation to actually complete household projects on our own. One thing that had been a LONG time coming was finally hanging up the canvases that I purchased in August. You might recall this blog post, where I asked readers to vote on which photo they liked better.

At about that time, I ordered 6 12x12 canvases from winkflash.com because they were having a huge sale on their canvases (which they are running again!! Get them while you can!). We were deep in the throes of our upstairs project at the time, and since the door to our upstairs is in the corner of the office (thank you for the randomness, home builders of 1920) I didn't want to put them up right away due to dust and all. I COULD have put them up in January, but somehow the first quarter of this year sped by and nothing of substance got done. Except for, oh yeah, finishing my masters program.

Before - our signature matte from our wedding. Almost 4 years later, I'm kind of over large wedding photos so this is now in our basement :) Maybe we'll put it up someday when we have a bigger house with more wall space!

For non Twin Cities residents, here is what these photos are of.
Upper row (L to R): 1. Washburn "A" Mill (not used anymore) on the riverfront in Minneapolis, previously pictured on this blog here. 2. University of Minnesota, our alma mater. More photos from the U of M here, but I actually went back to get this specific photo that included both the Washington Avenue bridge and the Weisman Art Museum in it. 3. The First National Bank sign in downtown St. Paul.
Bottom row (L to R): 1. Lake of the Isles, across the street from where I lived in uptown for 2 years. Previously pictured here. 2. Grain Belt Beer sign on the Mississippi in NE Minneapolis, previously pictured here. 3. Finally, the subject of the photo debate, the Cathedral in St. Paul.

These canvases turned out AWESOME - thanks to Sonja for telling me about winkflash! (Side note: will Sonja and Alex EVER update their blog again??) They definitely have the best prices (and also are good quality) on the internet - all you do is upload your photos onto their site, and they stretch the canvas for you. You can also stretch it yourself, but I have heard that is kind of a pain. The only hard part is finding photos where you don't really care about what is on the edges, because 1.5 inches on each side gets wrapped around the frame - that cut out 3 of my photos and I didn't have time to go back and get new ones that were more canvas appropriate. Now I'm liking how 6 looks in this space anyway, so I think we'll stick with this set up!

On an unrelated note, my in-laws got me flowers as a congrats for graduating and getting a new job - they are so beautiful! Or, they were - I got them last week and finally had to throw them away today :)

Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes

Yes, the name is offensive. I just don't know what else to call them! :) For those of you who have never had an Irish Car Bomb shot/drink (it's a little large to be called a shot, I think), it is a shot of Baileys with a little Jameson on top, dropped into a half pint (or full pint if you are in Toledo, Spain!) of Guinness and the whole thing has to be drank quickly or it will curdle. It ends up tasting kind of like chocolate milk, weirdly enough.

When I saw this drink in cupcake form, of course I had to make them. Deb at Smitten Kitchen is a genius for coming up with this one! (She might not have invented this cupcake, but hey - she's still pretty awesome!) Since our party was fairly close to St. Patrick's Day, I felt it was appropriate!

Kate and I tackled these after we made the Bananas Foster Cupcakes. We were a few glasses of wine into the evening, but these still turned out great :) It is a fairly involved recipe due to the fact that you have to heat butter and Guinness for the batter, make the ganache, cut out holes in the cupcakes, and also make the frosting - but OH BOY is it worth it!

Even if you only make the cupcake part of these, it will be worth it. These were EASILY the best chocolate cupcakes I have ever consumed. I was SO glad that you had to cut out the middles of the cupcakes, because then you also get to eat them :)

My cookie cutter was a little larger than recommended, but it still worked great!

The whole product is pretty rich and chocolately so it might be just TOO awesome for some people :) Definitely try these!!

Bananas Foster Cupcakes

I have a cupcake addiction. Every single cupcake recipe I see, I want to try. They are all just so cute and delicious :) When we had a party last weekend, I was extremely excited about the prospect of trying a few new cupcake recipes!

I saw these Bananas Foster Cupcakes awhile ago on Erin's Food Files, and they just looked so wonderful. I am happy to report that they are every bit as delicious as they look! The cupcake part is like a sweeter, fluffier, and more awesome banana bread and the frosting is a basic cream cheese frosting, but with cinnamon and rum. Can't go wrong with that :)

I copied Erin and also recorded the flambe-ing. Because of my slight fear of fire, I had Kate do the dirty work while I recorded the event :) I sound kind of insane on this video, but oh well! We got some pretty nice flames going on!

After the fire


Filling up the cups


You can see a few of the runts in the background. We ate those ones right away :)

It is finished.

I'm sure you all forgot about our upstairs remodeling project that we started LAST JULY. I got really sick of writing about it, as I mentioned in this post, and we remained at 90% completion for the last 3 months. Well, this past weekend we had people over, and nothing is as good of a kick in the pants to finish a project than having to show it to others!

We still clearly need to do some decorating, but I'm hoping that some of the thousands of photographs I am sure to take on our upcoming trip to Europe will work for wall art. We also need window coverings, a railing on the stairs and one more light fixture installed in the closet (where a bare bulb hangs now) but honestly - I'm not too concerned about any of that!

Without further ado - I present our upstairs. For a refresher on what it looked like before, please go to this post! (I'll also be putting before and after photos here, at my mom's request)

Stairs Before


Bottom of Stairs Now


Stairs Now


View from Top of Stairs Before


View from Top of Stairs Now


Another View Now


Small Closet Before


Outside Small Closet Now


Inside Small Closet Now


Walk in Closet Now! (there is no before of this, since as you can see above, we used to just have crappy racks for our clothes)


Other side of Closet Now


View from Front Wall Before


View from Front Wall Now


Sitting Area Before


Sitting Area Now

Quinoa Soup with Avocado and Corn

I had found this soup on one of my favorite blogs, Cheap Healthy Good, a little bit ago and it looked perfect for a quick weeknight meal! This soup was SO easy, and tasted wonderful! I loved it, and Ben loved it even more than I did, as was shown by him saying so numerous times while we ate :)

I would encourage all that enjoy Mexican flavors to make this soup immediately - it is a wonderful filling meal, and a bonus is that you really don't have many leftovers to deal with!

Black Bean Chowder and Cornbread

Ben and I are both huge fans of black beans, so we've been wanting to try this black bean chowder from Pioneer Woman for awhile. I was at a class all day when we had this, so Ben started this out as it takes a good amount of time to make with soaking the beans and all. It didn't seem too difficult at all, it just takes a few hours to simmer. For a PW recipe, this one was actually marginally healthy. Shocking, I know :)

Yeah, this makes a lot - be prepared to be eating this for days. We froze about 2 servings.






With the yogurt-cilantro relish

To accompany this chowder, I thought Pioneer Woman's cast iron skillet cornbread would be perfect. If I had actually read the recipe before starting to make this, I would have realized that this isn't sweet cornbread, which is my preference. Oh well! I just doused mine in honey and it was delicious :) If you like non-sweet cornbread, you would love this!

I thought the chowder was good, but it didn't blow me away or anything. Ben felt pretty much the same way. Not sure it's totally worth the effort, but I'm still glad we tried it.

A bit of summer in March

As I briefly alluded to in this post, I went to the Como Conservatory with Becky and Adelaide last Friday! I had taken the day off just in case I hadn't finished my paper by the point. Luckily I did, so I was able to actually go out and do something fun on my day off!

Of course I took a great many photos. Here are a selection of my favorites!

All this snow is probably gone now!


My lenses had some difficulty adjusting to the heat inside - it was easily 80 or so and coming in from the 35 degree outside was a shock!


This one is a little weird looking, but I like it :) I loved all the sunshine!






Adelaide clearly was not impressed :) Or she was just so hot in there that she couldn't do anything but sleep!




















Still sleeping!












Ahh, I love pictures with Becky - I always look like a giant! :)

I had been meaning to go to the Conservatory for awhile to take photos, so I'm glad Becky finally motivated me to go! It was a nice shot of warmth and color in an otherwise icky month :)