{gold & silver dinner party tablescape}

We recently hosted a little dinner party at our place to thank our friends for house-sitting and dog-sitting for us while are abroad this winter.  BBJ Linen helped us make it extra special by letting me use some of their brand new Aspen linens paired with their gold sea sponge chargers.  A home-made meal with great friends always makes for a fun evening, but it is always nice to make it extra special with a beautiful tablescape.  I am usually a die-hard gold fan so I was surprised by how much I liked the mix of the gold and silver together- especially in the table runners which I used running across the table to establish each place setting.

{26th birthday party: part two}

When Chris and I sat down to think up the menu for our birthday party, we only knew one thing for sure and that was that the main dish was definitely going to be some kind of pork.  It has become somewhat of on going joke how often Chris chooses to make pork as a main dish.  After finally deciding on a marinated pork shoulder; we added an herbed polenta cake, roasted parmesan potatoes, cheesy spinach gratin and garlic cremini mushrooms to the menu.  The we rounded it out with some herb butter garlic bread and a simple field greens salad with a balsamic vinaigrette, slivered almonds, shallots and goat cheese.  The main goal was to pick dishes that could all be prepared the night before so that we wouldn't have to be in the kitchen very much during the party.  Click on the individual names of dishes above to check out the recipes!

For the appetizers I choose to make simple one bite dishes that could be served cold and could be assembled the an hour or two before the party.  You can see the recipes for the Strawberry Pesto crostini here and the Caprese bites here.  The third appetizer was cantalope and proscuitto which is pretty self explanatory. 

The meal and entire night turned out wonderfully. I cant wait til next year!

{confetti lab}

Tonight I am going to be checking out the Confetti Lab party at The Wedding Pantry in Tustin. If you are in the area I highly recommend you RSVP right away and join me there tonight to check out all the wonderful party goods (there are also going to be tacos involved. enough said.)

For more information- check out Lauren's blog, A Fabulous Fete or if you don't want more info about the event, but you DO want to see lots of cute party ideas then go to her blog anyways!

{images via A Fabulous Fete}