Lesson learned - chives are not as pliable as you might think. You basically get one bite at the apple: either the darned thing lets you knot it, or it breaks in half. Robyn did most of the tying. And sighing. She sighed a lot. By the end, I think she was convinced that the chives were actually sentient beings and were conspiring against her.
Pimiento cheese "rolls" were much easier to make (and, apparently, pretty realistic, as we had to repeatedly reassure people that they were just garden variety tea sandwiches, funkily executed):
The "Hostess Sushi" came out super-cute and was super-easy to boot. We used slices of fruit roll-ups to secure Swedish fish candy to Rice Krispie treats, and more fruit leather was used to turn Twinkie slices into sushi rolls. (The "fish" in the middle? Gummi worm segments!) The Swiss cake roll slices are - well, Swiss cake roll slices. We didn't really do anything to those. (To paraphrase Helen Hunt in her role as a gingerbread house baker in the Saturday Night Live "Delicious Dish" skit about a food-themed NPR radio show - we made the Matchbox cars out of Matchbox cars. Hey - why mess with perfection?)
Another lesson learned - fruit roll-ups and humidity don't mix. The Twinkie sushi tried really, really hard to stick together when we were serving it (yeah, yeah - again with the anthropomorphizing of the food - but at times doesn't it feel like our food truly is plotting against us?) and felt - well, sort of clammy to me. But people enjoyed it, and I guess "clammy" equals "authentic" when you're talking about raw fish?
Sarah made her killer frushi (fruit sushi) with coconut sticky rice, pictured here:
"Young at heart" table decor-on-a-budget included: some of my collection of kokeshi dolls (carried home from Asia by my Army officer dad); paper lanterns decorated with this weird but really cool patterned tape that I found next to the colored duct tape at JoAnn (bought it for another use, had some left over); small quantity of chrysanthemum-patterned fabric; vase filled with water and those squishy neon tentacle balls that they sell at the dollar store (which I thought looked sort of puffer fish-ish); a wine bag and a silver gift bag turned upside down and decorated to look like office buildings (I labeled one for Woman's Club and one for JWC); Godzilla and a killer robot menacing said buildings (okay, we couldn't find Godzilla - we have one somewhere, but it's lost in my oldest child's room, so a remote-controlled dragon, missing most of his tail, had to substitute, and Bumblebee from Transformers is playing the part of killer robot); and a giant (to the scale of the buildings) scorpion. Because, you know, you'd expect to see a giant scorpion in a Japanese monster flick. And the Dollar Spot at Target did not have anything remotely close to Mothra - but they had scorpions. So . . . .
Not shown - a garland of Hello Kitty paper dolls and a bunch of origami shrimp that my origami-obsessed oldest child made for me. The reason they are not shown: I forgot them at home. I was doing good to get most of the stuff in the car that morning, and even then I managed to wedge Bumblebee on top of the dragon's remote control and something else on top of Bumblebee. Result: the entire drive from home to work and from work to JWC, the dragon was roaring and Bumblebee was telling the dragon, apropos of nothing, "I'm one bad 'bot." Funny for the first five seconds.
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