Illinois Reception

This little guy was hanging out, waiting for the party.

And it looks like this little lady was also just hanging out, waiting for the party. But she came in and helped me slice up tons of things. (If only we hadn't doubled and tripled the recipes...)

Good Housekeeping had a really enticing article on picnic foods. The recipes were meant to serve 8. Doubling the recipe looks like it's meant to serve 8 families. There were two platters like this...

This is the tarragon vinaigrette. I think I tried it. It sounded good. And I had to look all over for fresh tarragon leaves. We had some traditional onion dip, too. Or maybe it was ranch.

I was definitely too busy arranging shrimp skewers and trying to finish the 216 wings to sit down and eat a giant bowl of carrots. I should have placed a dollar bill next to the bowl for scale...

This wasn't what my mom wanted. Trays of shrimp with cocktail sauce in the middle were on sale. I said they looked sketchy and bought a bag of frozen shrimp instead.

You'll notice the lack of pictures of wings. I made them in buffalo, plain, chipotle and extra spicy varieties. I think only three of the nine packages actually went into the broiler. I had a lot of sangria.

I had cake, too. Although the invitations my mom sent out misspelled LV's name, the cake was correct. And tasty.