For the season premiere of the final season of Lost, R held a party, and we all had to bring something to eat, Lost related. H/A brought this cake, that he had somebody make. How cute is this? It’s the island, and it even has a little oceanic plane and jughead on it. It was a chocolate cake, and quite delicious! The sand? Not cookie crumbs, instead, colored sugar.
I was lazy, so I just brought my usual bean and white corn salsa dip. But I jazzed it up by putting it in a pyrex with a dharma kitchen logo on it. And hence, my dharma dip.
B brought these shrimp, which were marinated with tequila. He called these shrimp hugo.
R provided us with many additional eats, in addition to hosting. This was a mango, mozzarella, basil, with white balsamic salad. So tropical, yet italian, and awesome. Easy too!
For one of the entrees, R made these sloppy jacks. It was healthy too, made with ground turkey from a weight watchers recipe.
The other entree was shrimp kabobs. But instead of bothering to kabob them, she just grilled the pieces on the george foreman. Again, healthy! We have grilled peppers and onions and the grilled shrimp and peaches, which were glazed with lawry’s hawaiian marinade. So simple and tasty!
E made these Lost cookies… in the shapes of polar bears and planes. The planes even had the numbers on them. Yes, we’re all total Lost nerds.
R also made cups of dirt. Surely, when deserted on an island, you would have to resort to eating dirt and worms. See you in another life, brutha, or at the Lost finale party!

He’s been talking about it for years and years, but it finally happened. My uncle is retired! My aunt planned, and well schemed, a surprise retirement party. And it went off beautifully. Snowy weather and flight delays added a few wrinkles to the surprise, but otherwise, he was truly surprised! And of course, there was tons of good food! No one slaved for days on the food. Instead, it was catered! Shrimp cocktail. I love any party with shrimp cocktail!
Asian style mini meatballs. What makes the asian? Because they used sweet chili sauce in it. What an easy and brilliant idea.
Little mini spanakopita in the front. These weren’t that good. The mushroom cups in the back? Good! Actually, great. And this is coming from a girl who doesn’t really like mushrooms.

For a main dish, we had beef tenderloin with a mushroom gravy. This was the best entree of the evening.
Another entree was lemon chicken. I didn’t try this, but I heard this wasn’t that great. So I’m glad that I skipped it. The other entree was a veggie lasagna. A big vat of lasagna isn’t that photogenic. It was fairly tasty though. I would have preferred that the veggies weren’t so crunchy.
Rice pilaf. Not a favorite. Good, but there were chunks of crunchy bits in here.
Grilled veggies. I’m not sure what was in here, but there was definitely carrots, carrots, and carrots. There may have been a sweet potato, but I’m not that sure.
My favorite dish of the entire night was the salad. The mixed greens was nothing special, but it was what what was on top that blew everything out of the water. Candied walnuts, dried cherries, and an amazing balsamic syrup type of dressing. I could have just eaten a giant bowl of this and been stupid happy. This is my dream salad, because it’s like candy! I need to figure out how to make a dressing like that. Because well, I love candy! We also had mocha cake from the korean bakery. And everybody loved it! It was a fabulous party… happy retirement!

I headed up to the far burbs for the first dinner party of 2010 at N’s house. There are 5 cats in that house, most are unfriendly. There’s a lot of N’s art all around the house. Naturally, as she’s an artist. What’s a dinner party without cheese and crackers? And grapes! I ate an unfairly large share of these grapes.

There was tons to eat. Bread, with butter and nutella! Little tiny crab cakes with a remoulade. A made those. Some little phyllo dough puff things filled with spinach.

Garlic broccoli, and some random flatbread type of stuff.

Rice and some dip for the flatbread!

There was even a warming tray to keep the food hot! Hello chicken marsala! Hello veggies! And hello veggie ravioli! A made the ravioli too. It was all freakin delicious. I loved all the red and white dishes too, they were adorably old school.

For dessert, a ginormous fruit tart! It wasn’t much of a tart, it ended up being pretty much just a cake with fruit on top, but it was still quite tasty. We ended up trying to play this game, Quelf, later on in the evening, but it wasn’t so easy. There were too many people and too many of them were drunk, so game playing proved quite difficult. But we’ll have to give it a shot another time. Thanks N for the lovely party!