Grateful for Girls

We have posted a lot about of Friendsgiving celebration last week. Between menu planning, tablescapes, grocery shopping and cooking, we totally wore ourselves out!

November is a month where people traditionally focus on gratitude. We love that because we are both glass half full sort of gals. Grateful and thankful are words that we use all the time, especially with our kiddos who are growing up in a crazy world. But, as we sat and reflected on our Friendsgiving day after everyone had gone, we realized how truly grateful we really are.

Since the dining table held 8 people, we decided we would each invite 3 friends. We had both met each other’s friends, but Stephi’s friends had never met Suzi’s invitees and vice versa. We weren’t nervous about it but hoped everyone would gel. Well, if you watch our IGTV (total shameless plus!!), you will see that our group of 8 women almost immediately acted like we had been friends for years. Everyone found commonalities in kids, jobs, hometowns, laughter. It was truly a beautiful thing to see.

So, in the spirit of gratitude, we want to express how truly grateful we are for our friends. Personally, we talk a lot about how amazing it is that we somehow ended up living next door to one another and have truly formed a sister-like bond. It’s special. We bring out the best in each other and we celebrate it. We love each other at our worst and lift each other up through tough times. And most important, we laugh. Hysterically. All the time. And it is so good for the soul.

Not only that, but now, we have been surrounded by this little tribe of women, these ride or die, bury the body and never discuss, love unconditionally and always tell you the truth sort of women. To say that we are grateful for our friends is an understatement. We weren’t able to invite every friend to our Friendsgiving this year for lots of reasons, but we hope that as we grow this blog, we can make it a bigger party every year to celebrate more and more of our awesome girl tribe!

But it bears repeating…. Becky, Jamie, Laci, Paige, Rachel and Sha, thank you so much for being the amazing women that you are and sharing that day with us! We love you!!

Friendsgiving Menu

We both absolutely love to cook, so planning a menu for some of our best friends for Friendsgiving was so much fun! 

We did a lot of online research…. thinking about our guests, their preferences and most importantly, that we didn’t want to simply serve a typical Thanksgiving meal.  We wanted to use seasonal ingredients and flavors that echo the the holidays, but we will all be eating ourselves silly in just one week and we didn’t want to start too early 😉

Epicurious was a huge source of help for the menu.  They actually have a whole Friendsgiving post here that we used as a big source of inspiration.  You could literally use this entire menu for the most perfect party!

One of the big hits of the party were the Parsnip-Wrapped Devils on Horseback.  Despite the hilarious name, these little babies were CRAZY good and our guests loved them!  Bonus:  they are vegetarian, so a great option for anyone.  They are stuffed with blue cheese, but we think you could totally use goat cheese or something more mild if you don’t like the strong taste of the blue. 

For the main meal, we served the Stuffed Turkey Breast with Butternut Squash, Kale and Sausage from Epicurious along side these fabulous Candied Sweet Potatoes with Bourbon and the most beautiful salad ever created, the Persimmon and Burrata Salad with Sesame Candy, both courtesy of Food & Wine

The flavors were perfection together and no one felt overly full after this gorgeous meal.  A couple of tips that we learned:

  • The turkey recipe calls for boneless, skin on turkey breast.  When we go ours, one of the breasts was split in half and the other, the 2 breasts were attached.  (I mean, could we say breast anymore?!) The breasts (there we go!) that were attached rolled up much better and came out looking absolutely gorgeous!  The ones that were not attached were equally as delicious but the presentation wasn’t quite as pretty.  
  • We actually had planned to make the Shredded Brussels Sprouts Ricotta Toast, but in the chaos of the day, we totally mismanaged our time and about 10 minutes before the girls arrived, we hadn’t even started them yet!  WHOOPS!  We both wished that we could have had that brussells sprouts element in the day, but with how good the dates were, we don’t think anyone missed them.  And we definitely had plenty of food. 
  • Speaking of plenty of food, one of the best lessons we learned with this is to keep it simple.  Party planning is fun but it is also really stressful at times.  So, KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid!  Look at each recipe, take the timing into account, make as much as you can ahead of time and drink plenty of wine to get you through it 😉

Friendsgiving Table-scape

Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, and we cannot wait! We have visions of juicy turkeys, and pumpkin pies in our heads, but something else we are dreaming of is our table-scape!!

Suzi and I both love to entertain, and a fun part of entertaining is creating a fun aesthetic for your guests to enjoy! Our goal for the tables-cape was to have a light neutral feel. After scouring through hundreds of google images for inspo, we noticed a common feel to our favorite table-scapes was the use of eucalyptus leaves. Not only do they smell amazing, but they give the perfect texture to our centerpiece!

Our method to this was to curve it back and forth down the table and continue adding layers and textures.

We found bundles and bundles of different types of eucalyptus at trader joes, for only $2.99 a piece!!! 

Being that it is Thanksgiving, we wanted to include pumpkins! In order for it to go with our light, airy, neutral feel… we decided to go for ivory pumpkins. We found these little guys at Rubles for only 50 cents a piece.

For our place settings, we used dish-ware that we already had. (Find links to similar looks, below).

We found the candle holders, table runner, and white napkins all at Homegoods. We spent under $50 total! (who doesn’t love great pieces at great prices… am I right???)

Place card holder, and place cards, found at target!!

Seeing as though we are setting our table for a “Friendsgiving” feast, with all women… we wanted to add in an element of femininity. Our way of doing so was to use these adorable blush and gold wine glasses, found at Anthropologie! 

Marble coasters are from Target!!

We also tucked a few blush roses into our table-scape to tie in the pink!

Links:

Our friends loved the table-scape, and we hope you do too!!!

xoxo,

Stephi & Suzi!!! 

Cheers!

Holiday Crowd-Pleasers

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We have officially entered holiday season, and with holiday fun comes holiday FOOD! We have decided to cook up our two favorite holiday appetizers for y’all and we are confident they will please any crowd!!

First up:

Suzi shared Tootsie’s (her mom)  famous Sausage and Cheese balls!

Recipe:

2 lbs. room temp Jimmy Dean’s sausage

1.5 cups of bisquick

2 cups shredded sharp cheddar

1/2 cup finely chopped onion

1/2 cup finely chopped celery

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

Spicy pepper jelly for dipping (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix it all together evenly, by hand. Place parchment paper on baking pan. Roll sausage mixture into 1″ balls. Place sausage balls evenly onto baking pan. Put in oven on 350 degrees for 20 min.

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** Insider tip: You can freeze these little guys for up to 1 month!  In the event some surprise guests pop over, bust these bad boys out, and heat up for widespread enjoyment!

 

Next up:

Stephi’s famous spinach artichoke dip!!

Recipe:

2 packs of plain cream cheese (room temp).

1.5 cups of DUKE’s mayonaise

2 cups of fresh chopped spinach

1 can of artichoke hearts, chopped

1 tsp. garlic powder

1 package of shredded low-moisture part-skim mozzarella

1 package of parmesan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put room temperature cream cheese into an 8″ square baking dish. Stir in mayo. Mix in the chopped spinach and artichokes. Next mix in 3/4 the mozz, and 3/4 parm. Sprinkle in garlic powder and stir misture to your hearts content (or until evenly mixed. Sprinkle the remainder of the cheese on top and place in oven to bake for about 20 mins (or until cheese is very lightly browned on top). Now devour!!!

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Enjoy!

xoxo,

Stephi and Suzi

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