This week Paul and I had our small group from our church (reunionboston.com) over for dinner and it reminded how much I love to host! I really love our small group - it's a group of about 10-12 and includes 3 married couples and a newly engaged couple - so Paul and I just happen to fit right in. Most of them live in Dorchester and I'm so excited to be making friends in our little area - makes it seem much more like a neighborhood. They are also our first friends that Paul and I have made as a couple - most of our friends knew either Paul or me before we met each other.
I've said before how much I LOVE my little apartment in the NE, but with it being so little, it's not always the easiest thing to host more than 5 people there. Now that Paul's place (with a lot more space) will soon be my place too, I plan to come up with a lot more reasons/occasions to have people over often!
We decided to serve a Mexican themed dinner...it's a pretty safe choice for a group since it mostly just involves meat and veggies (which also satisfied our paleo style as well) :)
{I made homemade mango salsa - one of my favorite things to make in the warmer months}
{I prepped everything the night before - squeezing fresh lime juice in it to freshen it up the day of}
{the wine selection was made purely off the bottle decoration/coloring - however the eppa organic red sangria (eppasangria.com) was a hit}
{I found fun, festive, and inexpensive napkins at Target to brighten up the table}
{as I mentioned before, I prepped everything the night before - so I was able to just drop these into a large skillet and let them sautee away}
I didn't get any pictures of Paul grilling off of our back porch but he has started using our little charcoal grill (which we won and was blogged about way back here) a lot more - especially since the weather has finally warmed up....maybe I'll do a special blog post just on his grilling skillzzz.