My parents have been talking about moving here after they retired for the last few years and that finally happened in June, which just happened to be right in time for us to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary with them.  I have been so excited that they are finally here, and so excited to make them a special dinner for their anniversary.  Since the 40th year is traditionally the ruby anniversary I decided to go with a ruby red theme for the decorations.  I got a bunch of red roses and then I found this cute red sequin table runner on amazon.  I saw a card that used this layered paper rose and really wanted to do that for the name cards and menu, but it is a dicut and I didn’t have it… so I sort of drew the approximate shapes of each piece in illustrator and then cut them out on my silhouette.  I love how they turned out on the menu and name cards, how they pop out over the paper.

For the food I made this chicken, but I substituted some chicken broth and white wine vinegar for the champagne, which she says you can’t do… but I did anyway, and everyone still really liked it.  I love the rice recipe that I got from a family friend, it is such a great way to have a rice side that isn’t just plain rice.  I tried these potato rolls which were good, but I have a couple other ones that I loved so much more (one that I made for Christmas), I think I will just stick to them from now on.  The dessert is another recipe I got from a friend, which is a strawberry and lemon cream cheese angel food cake, but I tried out this method to make the little decorative swirls.  I ended up leaving the wax paper on the cake until it was cooled because it was a bit hard to not pull off the chocolate swirls.  It was still a bit tricky when it was cool, but way better than when it was hot.  It was a fun dinner, and I can’t wait for the holidays this year and that I get to have some of my family here for them finally.

Also, August is a really popular month to get married in my family… my mom sends out birthday and anniversary cards to all of my dad’s family, which I think is about 200 people by now, and more than 25% of the anniversary’s are in August…