It doesn't seem like it was almost a week ago I was standing in my back garden surrounded by friends and wearing only a short sleeved cardigan! When I look outside now it's grey and drizzling...
I spent Saturday morning and afternoon buying and preparing food - I can't believe how much we bought to feed everyone!
We calculated that we had over 10 kilos of meat....that should be enough for 25 people!
I ended up keeping it simple as far as the food so I could spend more time with friends rather than faffing around with a lot of different types of food. I bought in a lot of sausages and burgers but made chicken and pepper skewers and salads.
For the skewers I marinated 6 chicken breasts (cut into chunks) in a mix of about 1 1/2 finely minced cloves of garlic, about a heaped teaspoon of cumin, a small teaspoon of onion powder and 3 tablespoons of olive oil for 3 hours. I then skewered the chicken onto wooden skewers with alternating slices of red, green and yellow bell peppers with onion.
After prepping the food it was onto making the garden a little festive. Looking back, I could have done a lot more but again - keeping it simple isn't always a bad thing!
And of course I tried to make a bit of effort with my appearance...I'm not so great with having my photo taken so always end up pulling some sort of face!
I made the tissue paper pom poms the weekends before. Let me add now that I kept them up as long as possible because I loved having them around but unfortunately the rain/sun we had pretty much killed them so I'm now working on how to make weather proof ones!
People started showing up just after 2pm and at around 4 we decided to get the food on. One thing that I learnt was that even though it might take a while to grill food, make sure the bread, dips, chips and salad is out BEFORE everything is cooked so that you don't have a mad panic trying to get everything out!!!
Some friends brought their own meat to grill and I was really impressed with their efforts! Marinated pork with cumin, garlic and lime, beef with soy....
One of the highlights of the day was the pinata bashing! I was thoroughly impressed with the engineering skills of my friends (who had all had a few beers by then!) that rigged up a pinata line so we could safely whack the thing!
All in all it was an excellent day! I was so happy that a girl I went to school with 24 years ago (!!!) was able to come - we had so much catching up to do and it was really brilliant to see her! There really is nothing better than spending the day with people you love having in your life!
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