Fall Festival Party

Posted by ~L on October 30, 2009 · 2 Comments

The Meckley’s threw a Fall Festival/Wine Tasting/Halloween Party last weekend. Andy went all out with a fog machine, strobe light and a great Halloween playlist. The fog machine was awesome, but we had to disable the smoke alarms all through the house!

Only a few of us dressed in costume, but it was a fun night anyhow. I told Andy you know you’re getting old when everyone tells you that you threw an awesome party, you feel like you threw a good party, when everyone leaves you get things picked up and then get settled into bed and when look over at the clock you see that it’s not even midnight! Oh well, we all had a good time and I prefer that to our previous knock-down-drag-out-nights followed by a 2-day hangover. The party pretty much died down quickly after watching the Hawkeyes add another notch to their helmets after the nail-biting game against the Spartans. (Yay Iowa!)

Here’s a little run down of our menu and other fun photos:

Caramel Peanut Butter Apple Dip

A bag of caramels
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
Splash of milk
Splash of vanilla creamer

Cheese & Fruit for the wine

Cheese Dip
1 box of Velveeta cheese
2 lbs. of browned breakfast sausage

Everyone’s favorite Buffalo Chicken Dip

Apple & Pear Crisp Fake Out
Thanks to Kimba’s recipe
on A Soft Place to Land
Sadly, I don’t think anyone ate any of it! I had a bite later but need to
make it again because I know it’s super delicious.

Harvest Snack Mix
I adapted a recipe I found somewhere online. (Sorry, can’t remember
where!)
This is what I *think* I did:
Mix 4 tablespoons melted butter with 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves. (P.S. Note to self, DO NOT try to ground your own whole cloves in your Magic Bullet. You will ruin the plastic cup. Those suckers must be pretty rough or something. Not sure how or why, but I really messed up the cup and I had to toss it.) Then add a bag of popped microwave popcorn and 2 cups of pretzel sticks. Mix well, put in cake pan and toss in oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, let cool, then add in however much you want of candy corn (or pumpkins as you can see), chocolate stars, I threw in some kind of Ritz mini-bites that had frosting, and a cup of Banana Nut Cheerios because I knew they’d never get eaten otherwise. Then again, nobody but me ate this mix. I kinda like it.

And, last but not least on the menu, my favorite food item of
the night:

Meat & Cheese Head

This was really fun. Not really easy to eat, and no one really ate much, but it was a great addition. Find a plastic (or in this case styrofoam) skull. Wash well. You could add plastic wrap as someone mentioned at the party but I did not. Mix 2 blocks of cream cheese with whatever seasonings, I used garlic salt & onion powder. Spread on skull and cover with torn pieces of
lunchmeat. I left the eye sockets, nose, and teeth uncovered and popped two
large olives in the eye sockets. Dave decided the head needed a little more so
he added a festive knife:

Andy added dry ice to the punch:

And to drinks (P.S. we learned you should not add to beer!)

I forced my tall blonde babe to dress up like Fred so I could
be Daphne. I pretended for a moment Tiger was Scrappy. Our wigs were terrible, looked nothing like the photo on the front of the package, but oh well, you get the idea, right?!

Of course I had to dress up the boys:

The Willetts were super cute all dressed up. Karen even made
Lena’s costume!

The Duitsmans were great sports. They came from a wedding and
added accessories to their outfits to be in costume, though Tom almost
immediately took off all his cop gear. Amber made a great Flapper girl.

Demitrios decided to don my wig:

And The Elliotts and I had a good time hogging Andy’s remote later in the night so we could kick some old school tunes and reminisce back to our Junior High and High School days. :::singing::: One, Two, Three and To Tha Four…Because I’m Real…Meet Met at the Alter in Your White Dress…

And speaking of back in the day, Schmeed even brought us a
bottle of Mad Dog. Funny! That brought back some memories. I never knew it was a form of wine!

All in all, a great night with great friends – some old, some new…Love you all!

Filed under Food/Recipes, Holidays, House & Home · Tagged with fall, Friends, Fun, halloween, party

Happy Fall!

Posted by ~L on October 8, 2009 · 1 Comment

Today I am thankful for the season. I never used to get into decorating my house, not even for Christmas (Andy has been working on me on that!) but I do love to decorate for Fall. I put out my stuff last week and even started to do a little Halloween shopping, which I realized I also love!

This isn’t really “tablescaped” yet but I was so excited about my new Halloween purchases that I shoved things aside to put out my skull and spiderweb cake stand!

This was a leftover from our fabulous candy buffet at our reception. (Can you believe it’s almost been a year?!) I just tossed in some cinnamon pine cones and leaves.