I know, I know, this post is almost too late to publish…but I’m going to anyway.
This year our 4th of July was crazy busy, crazy hectic, crazy big, and crazy good. We started the day off cooking our butts off! Well..not so much cooking, as zero out of the three dishes we made involved actually cooking with heat…so I guess you could say we started the day off assembling our butts off. Originally, our duty was to make ONE batch of cole slaw for ONE party. That turned into THREE batches of cole slaw split between TWO parties (side note, we did not need to triple the recipe…I was just paranoid that we wouldn’t have enough food…we had way too much left over). Anyway, with my constant need to go over the top for any party, that quickly turned into THREE different dishes for TWO different parties…lots of assembly required. Oh yeah, and we had to buy buns.
The first dish was a Creamy Cole Slaw recipe by Bobby Flay, which Cody was mostly in charge of. I am not huge fan of cole slaw, but this one was pretty dang good. Also, I didn’t get a picture of the Cole Slaw…sorry Cody!
The second dish was a bunch of Caprese Skewers found on Mel’s Kitchen. I’ve been pretty obsessed with Italian food lately, so these hit the spot! And how cute are the little American flag pinwheel toothpicks I found at the party store?!
The third dish was my own simple creation that I’m sure has been done many times before – Red, White, & Blue Pound Cake Fruit Kabobs. They were delish.
You can check out the super simple recipe for those here.
First thing in the afternoon, we went to Cody’s sister’s house for some BBQ and a pool party. We had some great food, played with Cody’s nephews, jumped in the pool, and had a really nice time. Then we left for my house, ate more great food, played some poker, joked around, and got ready for the fireworks. There is a park right next door to my house that has a pretty good view of the firework show that our town puts on. Good view, no traffic, and its free – what more could you ask for? So my whole family headed over to the park and met up with Cody’s whole family and some of his brother-in-law’s family. Even some of our good family friends were there too! There were so many people I didn’t know who to talk to! Our family’s have met before, but not in a huge group like this, for this amount of time.
Cody had a football in the trunk of my car, so we ended up tossing the football around with his dad, his brother, my aunt, my cousins, and my uncle. It was really cute to see the two groups together. We all watched the fireworks, gave the kids some glow stick bracelets, and everyone mingled. Once the show was over, my mom was nice enough to invite everyone back to our house for dessert. I don’t think we’ve ever had that many people in our house at one time..at least not that many adults. It was packed in the kitchen! We had brownies, an american flag cake made by my cousin, festive M&Ms, my fruit kabobs, and even some strawberries to be dipped in powdered sugar with red sugar sprinkles mixed in. My mom is such an amazing hostess…she threw that whole berry thing together at the last minute. I envy the natural creativity she always has. I was really nervous about having so many different people together, but it went well and everyone seemed to have a good time.
This was definitely a busy 4th of July, but in a good way. We were able to split up the holiday, then bring it together…I guess we are going to have to get used to that if we intend to get married someday, huh? It was just really nice to see our two families blend a bit, and it was great to get to spend time with everyone. Here’s hoping next year is just as good!
