Official Party Business

Our Green Carpet Unveiling party is tomorrow, and I’m starting to freak out. We’re going to have between 40 and 50 people coming. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be like other parties we’ve had and people will be staggered throughout the day (there’s certain to be lots of staggering by the end).

I have a 16 pound pork shoulder, 5 pounds of London Broil, ~3 qts of buffalo chicken dip, however many mini quiches I can make, 6 lbs of burgers, 4 or 5 lbs of hot dogs, 60 deviled eggs, 100 oysters, 8 lbs of macaroni salad, 10 lbs of potato salad, 4 pounds of cheese, hopefully enough bruschetta (I bought 4 pints worth of tomatoes to make it), and….??? I think that’s all. We’re making Grown-up Arnold Palmers… Sweet Tea Vodka & Lemonade, 2 cases of pumpkin ale for slutty pumpkins (pumpkin ale w/ vanilla vodka in a cinnamon & sugar rimmed glass), 4 30-packs of Miller Lite, plus some wine. OH! And I’m also making mini ice cream sandwiches… homemade vanilla ice cream sandwiched between chocolate chip cookies. Last night I scraped the vanilla beans and infused ice cream with the vanilla. I found that working with vanilla beans is kind of a PITA.

All of our dishes except for the burgers and hot dogs are being made with local ingredients. I’m pretty happy about that. I hope that it comes out in the taste. The meats came from Cedar Run in Sudlersville, the oysters are coming from Choptank Oyster Company in Cambridge, cheese is from Chapel's Country Creamery in Easton, any egg dish came from our chickens, milk products came from Nice Farms Creamery in American Corner, and other various ingredients came from Clayton Farms in Denton. So basically everything came from within about 30 miles of our house. Pretty cool.

Now if we can somehow pull this all off in the next 24 hours, I will be a happy camper. I’m praying that the weather holds out for us. We’ve been incredibly lucky in the past during all of our parties being on beautiful days. Let’s hope that trend continues!