a moment to breathe...

Sometimes there is nothing better in life than when I have nothing to do. I used to go CRAZY when I had one free minute of unscheduled time. After all things wedding planning the last few months I was excited for a break.


I realized in all of my uncomplicated, unscheduled bliss of a honeymoon - how much I was looking forward to being home and being married to and spending some quality time with my wonderful new husband. This past weekend gave me that exact time I'd been looking for - and I turned out to be right. The less things scheduled - the BETTER right now!


Luckily we did have one VERY fun event scheduled though. Our friend Andy turned 40 and our other friends Jenny and Keith were sweet enough to throw him a party! In my efforts to be a wonderful wife I wanted to be a fabulous party guest and show up with some delicious contributions.


Derek and I LOVE to cook together - we registered at Williams Sonoma and received lots of amazing new kitchen gadgets from the wedding. I picked out a couple of new tools to try and decided on Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Boursin Stuffed Mushrooms.


I of course did not want to make just regular chocolate covered strawberries - so I did some googling seriously what did people do before google?! and found a wonderful idea to infuse the dipped strawberries with riesling. Ah HA! This would be an excellent opportunity to try out my new "injector". Also, I came up with the idea to do some strawberries with sprinkles, and some with almonds too. (not my idea - it was stolen from one of the 5200 wedding brochures I've looked through the past nine months.)  but hey - some of the best idea's are stolen right?!


So here are my finished strawberries...our new "injector" works wonders - and I tried a double broiler for the first time word to the wise - melting chocolate in a double broiler in comparison to in the microwave for dipping is NIGHT AND DAY difference. I will never go back to the microwave! 

Next up - with the strawberries set it was onto the mushrooms. 

My FAVORITE type of recipe are the kind that make you look fancy but in reality is was super easy. I'm pretty into looking fancy and proper, but I don't always feel like I have a lot of time. So the recipe I found for Boursin Stuffed Mushrooms was just the ticket! 

Here's the recipe: 

Ingredients:

40 medium sized mushrooms

1 cup Boursin cheese

melted butter

Directions:

Wash mushrooms and remove stems. 

Fill mushrooms with Boursin cheese. 

Brush the mushroom caps with melted butter. 


Bake on a cookie sheet at 350 for 30 minutes. I put parsley on them as well when they were baked about half way through. They made the house smell AMAZING! I think they were a total hit with our friends! Hey - anything that makes you feel and look fancy but didn't take all the time that fancy usually requires - is AWESOME in my book! 

Anybody else have any secret "looks fancy but wasn't" tricks??