Well, how many of you knew that Charlie, my brother-in-law and I were hosting a Murder Mystery Dinner on Easter night?!?! You didn’t? Well, I didn’t either! HA, just kidding, I thought we were hosting it on Saturday night – but alas, that is another story! Anyway, a couple weeks ago, Charlie (age 14) comes to me and asks me to help him execute this Murder Mystery Dinner – which for those of you who need a little bit clearer words means – Sarah, can you help me purchase decorations and help decorate and help me go grocery shopping and cook all the food and then serve it the night of the dinner?! HA! Yes! I told him – gladly! And what a great opportunity! Charlie budgeted for this dinner – we were going to have it around Easter because everyone and I mean EVERYONE was in town – we had John, Ruth, Sam, Me, Sadie, Nathan, Katie, Mike, Johnny, his girlfriend Siri, Judah and Charlie – oh and don’t forget Ethan – but he didn’t take up much room! So, we started planning a week ahead of time – we went to Party America for some fun tropical decorations – we decided to serve Pina Coladas as everyone was arriving, in costume, by the way…. So we got these fun little plastic cups. We got a couple of fun, colorful lais and took them apart and proceeded to hot glue the flowers to the stems of these cups – tons of fun! We had a great time doing that! Charlie addressed all the invitations and we assigned everyone a character and got them in the mail!
Example A: Notice the fantastically decorated pina colada cups – oh, also, this is Katie and Mike.
Let’s see, then what – well, the menu that came with the game wasn’t all that, so I did a few minor alterations – and totally changed it! Charlie wanted seafood, until I proceeded to tell him that NO ONE in his family ate seafood, including him, except for me, Nathan, Mike and Sam – 3 of which are all the in-laws! Anyway, we had a simple plan of salad and bread for appetizer, then BBQ Chicken, twiced baked potatoes and String Bean casserole for the main course and then miniature cheesecakes with kiwi, strawberries, and pineapple on top! So that was a great field trip to the grocery store, taking Charlie, his budget and our list – he got a real lesson on the cost of food these days! He was utterly depressed afterwards, I tried to tell him – Cooking one meal for 12 people is going to cost a lot of $$$! I think he believes me now!
Here’s the whole crew!
Anyway, here’s a little secret for you – I’ve gone completely crazy! I know to some of you, that may not sound like too much of a secret – but seriously – over the edge gone! Charlie thought it would be a good idea to glue shells to the handles of our silverware, a.k.a. fine clear plastic ware! So we were going to buy some shells and then I remembered I had a ton of them downstairs, so I began hot gluing shells on the silverware and three hours later, I finished all 12 place settings of forks, spoons and knives, I don’t know if you can see them all that well, but I should have taken a better picture of them, they turned out beautiful!
Like I said, I should have gotten better pictures, but we saved them, so hopefully they’ll show up again! But everyone of the 36 pieces were different!
So we had great fun! Here a couple more pictures for your viewing enjoyment!
This goes to show that John lost one of his eyebrows BEFORE the party started!
The Happy Coupe – Sam was suppose to be a fishing boat captain, and I was the made up role of his wife – turns out his character was a womanizer and I didn’t fit too well into that story – so it was good I spent all my time in the kitchen anyway!
The Happy Hosts! What a great time!