Buy More at Costco!

When tv season hits, we have a standing Monday viewing party to watch How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, and Heroes. Since our kitchen is done, FI and I offered to host this week's viewing party.

Since we now have an oven, we decided to make a Costco evening out of it and get lots of Costco appetizers and make a meal out of it.

FI's sister (FSIL) also came over early to help out. Here she is cutting French bread up for the spinach and artichoke dip (both from Costco).
For meat dishes, we bought (from Costco) honey barbeque wings and mini crab cakes. Here is FI spreading them out onto baking sheets for the oven.

Here are the crab cakes.

Into the oven they go! Even with our teeny oven, we were able to fit both trays in at the same time, which making cooking a lot more efficient.

We originally wanted to get a pre-made veggie platter from Costco, but it was like 15 bucks and mostly baby carrots, so we decided to make our own from Trader Joe's. We bought baby carrots, sugar snap peas, grape tomatoes, and hummus and we only spent 9 bucks on everything.

I wanted to wash everything and plate it all really nicely in a pattern on a platter. But when washing all of the veggies together, the colors looked so pretty all mixed up that I decided to just plate it that way. The reds and oranges contrast so nicely with the greens.

Here are all of our veggie dishes laid out on our coffee table. From left to right - veggie platter, hummus, tortilla chips, homemade salsa (made by FSIL with her Magic Bullet - it took her 7 minutes, not 3 to make the salsa), sliced French bread, and spinach & artichoke dip.

FI's party speciality is his homemade pigs-in-a-blanket. This was the one meat appetizer we did not get at Costco. He makes his own with cut-up hotdogs and cut-up pieces of Pillsbury's crescent rolls.

Here is FSIL cutting up the hotdogs into fourths.

FI then cut up each piece of crescent roll into quarters and rolled each hot-dog section with a piece of crescent roll. Here is everyone rolling pigs.

FI ended up making 64 pigs-in-a-blanket! 2 packs of hotdogs times 8 dogs each times 4 cut pieces equals a lot of appetizers.

Prior to the oven, FI would cook them in his toaster oven. Today he used both the oven and toaster to make all of the pigs.
After the appetizers baked long enough, we would let FSIL's boyfriend taste them for temperature approval. I kept asking "Does the temperature suit your palate?" He liked everything so we plated all of the meat appetizers.

Here are all of the meat dishes on one end of our work table. From top to bottom, right to left - mini crab cakes, pigs-in-a-blanket, honey bbq wings, and meatballs.
Our friends also brought over soda and beer and desserts - Carvel ice cream sandwiches and green tea roll cake. Everything was super yummy and we finished off most of the food. I think we have 4 mini crab cakes, some bread, and some veggies left.

TV night was fun too...

How I Met Your Mother was hysterical. FI especially enjoyed it because he is a huge burger fan as well and we've been to many of the places they mentioned in the episode. Many of our dates have been FI taking me to his favorite burger places - Shake Shack, Corner Bistro, the burger place at Le Parker Meridien, etc. What was even funnier was everyone's exhilarated comments about how good the burgers were. It's all about the first bite and sigh as you take a moment to absorb the tastes and flavors and textures. It was a little ironic that there was all this focus on the Goliath Neighborhood Bank in this episode just as the whole financial markets system is imploding. But they most have shot this a while back and it was really more about Barney being a walking commercial and Marshall getting a job.

Chuck was its usualy combination of daring spy stuff, funny moments with Chuck and Casey, funny moments with Chuck and Captain Awesome, funny moments with Chuck and Morgan, and just general craziness of the Buy More and Nerd Herd crew. Michael Clarke Duncan did a nice job as the bad guy in this episode. What I always find clever about Chuck is how they use something mundane from Chuck's everyday life that helps him when he's stuck in a spy situation. I also love the chemistry between Chuck and Sarah and really the relationship between Casey and Chuck. You know underneath the toughness Casey is a big 'ole teddy bear!

Heroes was intense. I think I liked this week's episode mainly for the fact that Mohinder and Maya were not in the episode. I like getting more backstory on the Nikki/Jessica/Tracy characters and how they were all "made". I completely believe that the reason Zachary Quinto got the part of Spock in the new Star Trek movie is because of his magnificent eyebrows (although Peter Gallagher's will always be tough to beat). I like how they are using Sylar (the most evil character basically, as comic relief. Mama Petrelli is also totally bad-ass, which is pretty cool.

A fun, fun evening!