By now you know how much I love to cook and prepare foods to look nice. I’ve made things many times for other people for free and parties just for fun.Well, one day a friend of mine, Brenda Touchstone and I were asked to cater a surprise 50th wedding anniversary party. What a feather in our caps, we thought. People liked our food well enough to pay for it!! Now we needed to really get creative ! We started days ahead of time with getting out our best platters and using silver and cut glass plates and bowls. We fixed the punch with fruit and froze it and made pretty little flower mints and wrapped them tightly. Then came the meatballs, made from scratch of course and then put in a crock pot with pizza sauce to blend well and the cocktail weenies with chili sauce is prepared the same way. The cheeseballs were next and easy, just needed my husbands hands to mix it up well , then we could fix it in whatever shape we wanted. Some rolled in crushed nuts while others in parsley or paprika. The fillings for the tiny sandwiches could be done ahead but we needed to put them together after we got to the place for maximum freshness. The chips just needed pored into their pretty bowls. As you can see we were giving it our all. The day finally came and we were ready. With all we had to carry we decided to drive my camper van with the bed over the front seat. When we got to the party place we found no one around. My they were running late, we thought. We sat for a while then decided we’d better find someone to open the doors so we could get started putting the food out. It was a weekend so there was not a soul on duty. Finally after knocking on many doors we found someone who had a key. They reluctantly let us in. Nothing was ready, not a table or chair in sight. We started making phone calls but the only people we got ahold of were the parents of these two sisters who were surprising them with this party. So we couldn’t a say a word about our dilemma to them. Time was passing and we couldn’t figure out why not a person was showing up. Finally someone we reached told us how the party had been changed to another location and the only people they forgot to tell were the caterers. The people with all the food and drink!! Anyway, since my friend Brenda grew up here in Tennessee and I was a transplant from Ohio she felt she could drive faster and know short cuts since we now had to go leave the area we were in, drive through downtown and across to another mountain top to where the party was now being held. She drove as fast as she could and I sat at the little table in the back cutting up fruit and making sandwiches that had to have the crust cut off and made into shapes. We arrived there in time to unpack and the sisters were there to help carry everything in. Without a word to each other we went straight to work making the tables pretty with all our best dishes and arranged them in order, like the chips went on the table with the sandwiches and the mints and nuts went with the punch and punch cups. The sisters were very apologetic and tried to help as the time for their guests to arrive was quickly approaching. As we poured the last of the punch into its bowl……people were starting to come in the front door!!! We were going to slip out the back door when we realized there was not a back door. We were a mess in old cut off shorts and punch and strawberry juice all over us. What were we to do!!! People wouldn’t want to eat what we had so skillfully prepared if they saw how messy we looked ! We noticed there was room under the bar for the two of us to hide. So there we hid all evening ! The sisters felt so badly for their mistake of not telling us the party place had changed that they kept handing us bottles of good wine, which we enjoyed as we sat quietly in hiding.The party went off without a hitch and we were excited to hear first hand of the compliments people gave about the food!! To this day neither of us remember how we got home driving that big camper, but we did and here are a couple of the recipes you might enjoy with the holidays just around the corner.