blue artichoke

Saturday, Gentleman Caller and I are finally going public with the news of our marriage. We're having a party (a.k.a. "the Wedding Throwdown") to celebrate our enigmatic union and to show off all the cool wedding presents we got from GC's family and their friends. I have planned a rather eclectic menu featuring cheese, bread and chocolate, with a few other flavors thrown in for variety. I tried to choose bite-size finger foods so I won't have to use plates or silverware, and things that will hold at room temperature for many, many hours. There will be a cheese plate with a few hunks of cheese, a bacon cheeseball, a gorgonzola-fig terrine, apples, pears, grapes and assorted crackers. These will display both of my cheese platters (I have two!), my fancy cheese slicer (a gift from my mom from our Norway trip) and the three pewter mice pins and placards (also from Norway). I made the terrine and the fig syrup yesterday and the bacon cheeseball today. Today I also made Blue Grilled Cheese’s recipe for spinach-artichoke dip. I think it is BGC's recipe because it seems very similar to one I helped her make for a Christmas party years ago. It's chilling in the refrigerator now, but I already licked clean the mixing bowl. Good stuff. This will be served in a sterling silver pointy-oval, leaf-shaped bowl.

I'm just so happy to have an excuse to use all these pretty things I got for getting married. Sometimes I feel sorry for them. Think of the excitement they felt, being selected from the store display, dressed up in pretty wrapping paper and taken to a fancy country club party. Then the disappointment of being crammed into a car and shut into a dark basement storage room. Well, I won't allow my pretty things to be disappointed any longer. Saturday, they will bask in the admiration they deserve.

I'll make more treats tomorrow.