election night!

Tuesday was a big day in the ol' US of A.  To mark the occasion, Austin and I hosted an election party with a handful of our closest friends.

The original idea was thought up by our friend Ashley.  She is really good at coming up with fun things for us to do, so when she emailed us with the idea of turning the election into a party, I was totally on board.  We decided to make it a pot luck, so I came up with a very American menu: chili dogs with potato chips and sugar cookies.  Everyone was given their food and/or drink assignments, and we kicked off the party around 7:00.

Here is a picture of our decor for the evening:

Reppin' the stars and stripes

I was in charge of the chili.  I found a recipe on one of my favorite food blogs, and because we were having a slew of people over, I doubled it.  I used the biggest pot I own, but that was not big enough...womp.  I hadn't even finished putting in all of the ingredients, and my pot was overflowing.  Ahhh! 


I was in a chili-induced freak out.  I was barking at Austin that I didn't know what to do and that our entire night would be ruined because the chili didn't have all of the ingredients that the recipe called for.  I was also babbling on and on about how we needed to put some of those restaurant-sized pots and pans on our wedding registry.  All the while, the chili was beginning to boil and bubble up over the edge of the pot and splash all over my stove.  I was in shambles.   

Enter my glorious crock pot!

All of the chili fit, and I was even able to add my last couple of ingredients.  The chili was a success!  Hip hip hooray!  Everyone also said it tasted really good.  Double success!

After I cleaned up all of the chili that had bubbled over and the dilemma was resolved, we started grillin' up some dogs...

Love my grill pan!

I also set up a little buffet thing:

cups, silverware, cheese, hot doggies, and chips!

 The chili dogs were deeeelish...

What is more American than this?

We also had some yummy sugar cookies:

Can you tell what party we were all rooting for?

Ok, enough about the food.  Let's talk about one of my favorite parts of the evening: the dranks!  Our friend Lauren brought over the ingredients to make some adult root beer floats.  The cocktail includes whipped cream vodka, root beer, whipped cream, and a cherry to top it all off!

My cherry had already sank at this point.  Boo.

Because we are all recent college grads and we try to relive our glory days as often as possible, we decided to turn the election coverage into a drinking game.  Ashley even wrote all of the rules down for us on a tri-fold science fair project board:

I told you Ashley was great at this whole party planning stuff...

 The evening was really fun...until we realized that our guy was going to lose.  That one kiiiiiiind of put a damper on things.  It's always good to hang out with friends for a mid-week pick me up though, and I know I had a lot of fun (after that whole chili debacle).

Did everyone else have fun watching the results roll in??  I think we'll make this election fiesta a tradition.