Wine, cheese and Salumi party

I entertain at home quite a bit. I've thrown more than a few dinner parties and am always on the lookout for new recipes or presentation ideas for my next event.  Every few years though I decide to have a bigger affair and throw myself a birthday party. My most recent was this past Saturday evening.

First off we went to do the grocery shopping. Do you think we bought enough wine?

I decided to put all of our saved wood wine crates to use and use them to present the food instead of using plates and bowls. Here's an example of some of the crackers on display:

We chose to use real wine glasses instead of plastic ones and so I needed a system to be able to have each guest remember which glass was theirs. I have recently been playing around with recycling plastics by shrinking it in the oven and then turning it into jewellery so I thought that the same technique could be put to good use with the wine 'charms'.

I wrote out 30 words of characteristics that somellier's use when describing wines which can also be used to describe people, cut them all out and shrank them.  I then attached each to the base of a wine glass with 'patafix/funtack' which is a gum-like reusable sticking compound easily found in any office supply store. 

When the guests arrived I had each of them choose a glass with a characteristic that they thought best described them. It was fun because everyone remembered which glass was theirs and not all of the characteristics were entirely flattering. .  I guess if you turn up late to one of my events you deserve some gentle teasing... how does one choose between shallow and vicious?

We had a baby buffet for the 4 kids who attended and some outdoor toys set up. It was fun that they could choose what to eat all by themselves and kept them quite busy for a while.

 Everyone seemed to have a wonderful time, all of the food was eaten and people even asked me for the recipe for my dip - the only thing I actually had to prepare for the evening. The rest of the food was salumi, cheeses or raw (fruit and veg).  Since I also put out a lot of different types of crackers and breads to be eaten with caponata, patè or cheeses I made sure to lay out some brown paper on the table and handwrite the names of the different sauces and salsas so people would know what they were eating.

It really was a super easy and fun event to host and really a hit.  I love that there were only a few plates to clean up (but of course, all those wine glasses needed hand washing) and that we could use the space outside our house.  I could have never had the same 30 people in my tiny loft.

Special thanks go out to my hubby for being the best wine -server and DJ, to my friend Stefy who although couldn't be there lent me 18 wine glasses and didn't flinch when I only returned 16 and my special surprise guest and fantastic helper - my mom - who flew all the way to Milan from Montreal Canada just to help celebrate!