Birthday parties, booze bouquet, recipes and mini bar ideas

Last night I hosted my husband's 40th birthday party. It was really fun, we had a lot of friends over, and since our house isn't huge, we decided to try having the party in the garage. Early October in South Dakota can be either warm or cold. Last night was cold! But we moved the car and truck out and borrowed a few space heaters, and viola, the party was perfect. We moved in our patio tables and chairs and I didn't care at all when a drink got spilled on the garage floor. It was a great way to show off the whole "man-cave" to his friends. (I have a fun idea to add to it for Christmas.)

For my gift to him, I always throw his party and make his bourbon cake. No, I can't share the recipe, the friend who gave it to me told me not to. Last night we increased our guest list and I spent 2 days cooking getting ready. I served chili (with hot dogs for chili dogs and french fries for chili-cheese fries), homemade runzas - a divine food from Nebraska and southwestern egg rolls. For the kids I also made pizza rolls - they burned through those in no time flat, and pink lemonade cupcakes.

I sewed 3 Girl Scout vests to help me pay for the party and was able to buy him the first 2 seasons of the show "Archer" on DVD along with the book "How to Archer"

The second part of his gift was a booze bouquet inspired by an image similar to this:

Except to make mine, I went thrift shopping (like you didn't see that coming,) and I found an awesome retro-70s-faux red leather ice bucket for $2.50. Then I bought a pack of 10 chopsticks at the dollar store. At the liquor store I bought 10 different individual shot-sized bottles, the most expensive was $1.79. To put it all together, I hot-glued the bottles to the chopsticks at varying heights and added some festive-sparkly ribbon to each one. I filled the ice bucket with ice and added the booze-on-a-sticks. All said, I think I spent about $20 on the whole thing. And now we have an ice bucket.

His friends kept showing up with unnecessary gifts so now I have 3 bottles of bourbon, a bottle of tequila and all those mini-bottles to store. This has inspired me to start a new quest. We need a DIY Mini Bar!!! I'll post more as I decide what to do.

My friends asked me to share the recipes for the egg rolls and runzas, so here they are:

Southwestern Eggrolls:
1 small can refried black beans
1 small can drained black beans
1/2 pkg frozen spinache - thawed and squeezed dry as possible
2 medium fresh tomatoes, diced
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
4 green onions, finely chopped
1 tsp cumin
salt & pepper to taste
3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
3/4 cup grated monterey jack cheese
flour tortillas
oil for frying

Combine ingredients (except tortillas) in a large bowl. Put a couple heaping Tablespoons of mixture in a warmed tortilla. Wrap like a burrito-very tightly. Use a toothpick to hold closed.

Fry in 1/2 inch deep oil in a skillet over medium heat (oil is ready to fry when it bubbles around the handle of a wooden spoon when you insert it). Turn and brown on both sides. Remove to a cooling rack over a paper towel. Cut diagonally and serve with dip or salsa. Can be prepared and refrigerated before frying or can be fried and the frozen. Reheat in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes.

Runzas
Filling
1/2 lb ground beef
1 onion minced
2 cups cabbage, chopped fine
2 Tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper

Dough
4 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 packages of dry yeast

Preheat oven to 350.

Filling: brown ground beef and onions. Wilt cabbage in butter and then add to beef.
Dough: Put about 1 3/4 cup flour in a bowl. Stir in sugar, salt and yeast. Heat milk, water and shortening until warm and add to flour mixture. Add eggs and beat with mixer on low speed for 1 minute. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. Stir in rest of ingredients and knead dough for 3 minutes. Cover and let rest for 20 minutes. Roll dough very thin and cut into rectangles (about 4x6). Place 3 Tbsp of meat mixture in center and bring edges together. Bake 10 to 15 minutes until golden brown.

Variations: (swiss cheese & mushroom), (pizza sauce, sausage, pepperoni & mushroom)

Have you ever heard this rant:

The garage is the only place in this house that I can really call mine!

Yeah, my husband has told the girls and I this particular fact more than once. So after the last time he got mad about the garage being left in disarray, my 7 (almost 8) year old said, "Let's make the garage really special for him!" So we started hatching plans. We figured we needed wall hangings, his favorite mascots and maybe some furniture.

Our first idea was a big sign proclaiming the garage to be Dad's. Here's the graphic I came up with:


I removed the "established date" from this picture in case someone wanted to use it. You can use this image or email me if you would like a higher resolution copy.

I started out with the idea of using an overhead projector to put the sign on the wall and painting it like a traditional mural. There were 2 problems though:
1. The garage needed a second coat of paint and I had no idea when that would happen
2. My 7 year old needed to help with the mural for a GS badge and I didn't figure she needed to be on a ladder.
So, how to create the sign inexpensively? I found white foam core at our local dollar store - 20x30 sheets. So I bought 3. Then I had to figure out how to get the design big enough and transferred over to the foam core. I used the website BlockPosters to enlarge my image to poster size. Then a friend suggested rubbing the back of the taped together poster with a dark colored chalk. Place the chalk-side down on the foam core and trace the design with a ballpoint pen, being careful not to puncture the paper/foam core.

[Now here is where I want to give you a hint. If you are using foam core, it probably has a paper coating that you'll actually be doing the painting on. In a garage, it may be exposed to moisture. It would be smart to paint a base coat of white paint (or whatever background color you choose) on the foam core BEFORE you transfer and paint the design. I learned this the hard way.]

Painting the sign was pretty standard. I started by outlining all the black areas so that my daughter could do the fill work, and theoretically not go outside the lines. I need to work with her on the concept of pulling the paint along instead of pushing it. So after she did the fill work, I went back and cleaned up the edges (sometimes more than once.) We then discovered that the checkered flag was too difficult to differentiate from the wrench, so I went back and painted the flag with gold paint. Here's the finished sign:


The next idea was to give my husband a little bit of functional furniture for the space. The garage really is a garage though. It has his tool bench, cupboards for storage, bike/toy storage and 2 cars in it. We weren't going to be able to find a couch for him. But he does have an old t.v. out there and on nice evenings we like to sit in the cross-breeze from the back and front yards while the kids play outside. So we thought we could give him a cool fold up table for beverages. I checked my local garage sale website and found someone with wooden t.v. tray tables. She gave me one for $3 because it had marker on it. We brought it home and painted the top black. Then we started arranging our bottle cap collection on it. We didn't have quite enough (a lot of the caps were used to make GS Christmas ornaments) so we added cool vintage Budweiser coasters and started gluing. As you can see, we are still a few caps short, but we are taking donations from friends and we'll have it full in no time. Then we will see what my husband wants to use to finish it, but I'm leaning towards self-leveling epoxy to make a nice hard finish.


The final step was adding his mascots. I had 6 metal trays that I thought would make cool wall hangings, all I had to do was come up with stencils for them. Without thought I was able to come up with the Chicago Bears, Jeff Gordon and the Nebraska Huskers. I found acceptable images and printed them off as big as I could get on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I could go into how to cut a stencil, but really, here's a great tutorial that will probably explain it better: Stencil Tutorial
My husband was okay with the first 3 signs but then he said, "what about the Oakland A's, the Atlanta Hawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins?" Okay, it was my fault for not thinking of the A's, but in the 12 years I've known this man, I've never heard him mention the Hawks or the Penguins. Oh well, whatever makes him happy. They turned out okay but the Huskers one is a second generation - I overcut the first and then gluing it down to paint with was nearly impossible - and the Penguins almost went flying across the room about 30 times before I got it done.








So that's the garage makeover. He likes it and we're pretty proud of ourselves.