The Housewarming

Last weekend, less than a month after moving into our new house, we held our housewarming party.  I’m the type of person that starts planning the party before the closing documents are signed, so clearly I’d been looking forward to it for a long time.

We invited more people than was probably sane, so I couldn’t complain too much when many of our guests didn’t show.  (Mother’s Day weekend + spring sports + bad weather = not a good combination.)  Still, we had a reasonable number of people come to see the new place.  I definitely felt a little self-conscious giving the tours; we were lucky to buy a house that needed very minimal amounts of improvements and I could feel the friendly envy from some of our friends.

The invitation encouraged people to bring food or beverages to share and I wasn’t sure who was going to actually show up, so I kept the menu simple:

Made:

The Wannabe Chef’s Vegetarian Buffalo Chicken Dip

Smitten Kitchen’s Cheesecake-Marbled Brownies

Peas and Thank You’s Sangria for All (non-alcoholic)

Purchased:

Beer and wine (If you hadn’t tried Sam Adam’s Porch Rocker, you really should)

Cheese, sliced

Carrots and celery, sticks

Hummus

Salsa

Pita Chips

Blue Corn Chips

Fun size candy bars

Guests arrived with more beer, more vegetables and ranch dip, cookies and brownies.  And lots of plants and flowers, which I’m really excited about.  Hopefully I can get around to planting some of them soon! Everything I made went over really well which always makes me feel accomplished (and reminds me that I promised to email recipes to people).

In the end, we had plenty of food leftover, which is why you should only serve food you actually want to eat at parties.  We’ve been working our way through sliced cheese and vegetables all week and it’s been awesome to have snacks ready to go whenever we want them.  Overall I’m really thrilled with the way the party went and now that I’ve hosted one event in the house I’m looking for an excuse to have another.  It’s so nice to have a space that I can entertain in.