Surprise Party Snackies

I love having house parties and erin and i were worried when we moved that no one would come to visit us :( (we live sorta out of the way for some of our city friends). But we underestimated what great friends and family we have! erin just turned 27 on the 2nd so in honor of her big day a few friends from NYC drove down to surprise her. time for our first house party!

I of course knew that people were coming so i planned ahead of time to have a nice snack table for noshing as we boozed it up! I don't eat alot of meat, as you can tell I'm sure, and our friend dan and erin's sister lizzie are both vegetarian so i wanted to have dishes that everyone could enjoy. that being said it was erin's birthday party so it needed to be good too!!

I decided to have the typical spread of veggies (orange pepper, fresh mushrooms, broccoli. and baby carrots) with hummus. We also had some chips with salsa and a platter of cheese and crackers. Oh, and a bowl of erin's famous bridge mix. I wanted to spice things up a bit a picked a dip from Eating Well that looked simple and delicious: Black Bean Dip. I had everything in the cupboard already and the assembly took all of two minutes (including opening the can of beans!). Loved it. It will definietly be a regular addition to party spreads.

Next I wanted to do something cooked, even though we weren't having dinner I think its always nice to have something hot as well. Another recipe that has been in my "to make" list is HG's Pigs in a Blanket. These also were super simple to assemble and I made them up before any of our guest arrived so all I had to do was pop them in the oven. I made two batches, one with fat free hot dogs and one with veggie dogs. I didn't quite figure out how to cut each triangle piece into four more triangles...but I managed to just roll each piece of dog up in a blanket. They were nice and cozy. YUM! These were a hit as well. Behold the spread:

For desert erin really didn't want a cake this year (she is trying to stay healthy in between holidays...that's my girl), and keeping with a party idea I thought it would be fun, and festive, to make gingerbread men/woman in this case for decoration. These were a low-fat (of course) recipe that I found. After the master plan was hatched I realized that I didn't have a person cookie cutter...so I free handed it. It didn't turn out awful!!

The rules were that you had to decorate a "woman" that looked like erin and then she would judge the winner...the entrants were quite interesting ;). Everyone had fun being creative and I think erin had fun judgingI entered with my friend Molly and we WON! (ours is the one with the red mittens)

I swear it wasn't rigged at all, but try telling that to some of the guys!

I think our friends had a great time...and more importantly I think erin had a fun filled birthday.