Our first dinner party!

Since we finally got a fourth set of china for Christmas (thanks again Gunters!), we decided it was time to start having people over for dinner! We had so many friends and family who helped out so much for our wedding and we want to start there, so we invited Mike Skyba and Karrie Lynn over first.

Skyba was not only a groomsmen, but also helped make the table numbers, accompanied Matthew on lots of his errands, helped us pick out the cakes, and helped deal with the rehearsal and cleaning up the rental house the day after the wedding. Karrie was our awesome wedding videographer and was also crucial in the rehearsal and the clean up after the wedding as well. We are so lucky to have such amazing friends and can't wait to return the favor someday ; )

We ended up inviting our good friend Matt to dinner as well. He wasn't able to make the wedding due to a family vacation, but he was very generous and gave us a terrific gift so we wanted to thank him too!




We started with a yummy Caesar salad and I served a coastal Pinot in our new Burgundy glasses.



I found a recipe for a baked ravioli on Pinterest. So easy and seriously delicious! You can view the recipe here, but of course I had to make a few tweaks. I made three layers, using different raviolis for each one. The layers were lobster, spinach and ricotta, and tomato, basil, and mozzarella. For the sauce, I combined a jar of creamy tomato and spinach with a jar of garlic Alfredo. Here is the before shot:



Here is the glorious after shot! I cooked up some Brussels Sprouts too, cause they're awesome!







Of course, no Italian dinner is complete without my famous cheesy garlic bread!







For dessert, I stumbled across a copycat recipe for Starbucks Lemon Loaf that I made into a bundt cake. The icing was so yummy and easy to make, just lemon juice and powdered sugar! Here is the recipe if you want to try it out!







Skyba enjoying some tea in our fancy teacups. He's sticking out his pinky haha!




Let's see how many leftover wedding items you can find in this picture!

After dinner, we played the card game Cards Against Humanity that Karrie brought over. It's basically an adult Apples to Apples and was such a blast!




We need to buy this game, so fun! The night was a success and we can't wait to have more people over for dinner very soon!


Cheers!
Kelly Smallcombe