Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy An UNO Birthday: The Food

Link to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy

Posted: 04 Jan 2012 07:18 PM PST

The decorations were the easy part of Baby Boy’s UNO themed birthday. The next item on the checklist – the food – was a lot trickier.

Let me count the reasons why:

It was right after Christmas, so we weren’t exactly loaded with cash if you know what I mean.
I wanted all the food to be safe for both him and his brother and their allergies.
I also wanted it to appeal to all the guests at the party.
I didn’t have a huge amount of time to prepare it because I only officially settled the date of his party less than a week in advance! Oy!

Yes, you are right. I needed the food to be Quick, Easy, Cheap and Healthy (or at least safe). It’s all sounding very familiar, isn’t it?

Thankfully, I am used to this driving need for QECH food – as if you couldn’t tell – so it didn’t take me long to come up with a menu. And a time for the party. This is of ultra-importance: if you don’t have a lot of money to feed a crowd, then don’t plan your party during a meal time. If you do, your guests will expect a full meal and it would be rude not to provide one for them. But if you plan the party in between meals, say at 3pm, a buffet of snacks will suffice.

And so we had a small buffet of snacks. On the menu:

Tortilla Chips, Salsa and Guacamole

The guacamole (not pictured) was a big hit, possibly because of my addition of cumin, and possibly because I followed my sister’s recommendation to use fresh rather than dried cilantro. Both add a lot of flavor.

Guacamole

Ingredients

3 soft avocados
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
handful fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tsp cumin
salt & pepper to taste

Instructions

Slide a knife through the side of each avocado until you feel the tip reach the pit. Continue cutting all the way around the circumference of the avocado, then pull the sides apart from each other. Remove the pit, then scoop the avocado into a bowl. Mash the avocado flesh with a fork until it is creamy.
Stir in the remaining ingredients and serve immediately.

I used canned diced tomatoes for the salsa because it’s not tomato season around here, and I didn’t want to risk mealy tomatoes (blech!) in my salsa. In the summer, it’s fresh tomatoes all the way, baby. I do still have some frozen peppers from the farmers’ market this past summer, so a couple of them went into this salsa. The freezer is like a time machine sometimes! Fresh peppers in December… mmmm. This is a very basic salsa recipe, and how I usually make it.

Semi-Fresh Salsa

Ingredients

1 large can diced tomatoes, drained
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Carman peppers, chopped
1/2 onion, chopped
1 jalapeno, chopped
handful fresh cilantro, chopped
splash of lemon juice
dash of salt

Instructions

Stir ingredients together (or chop them into chunks and run them briefly through a food processor). Refrigerate at least several hours before serving to blend flavors.

UNO Veggie Tray

Following the success of my Christmas tree-shaped veggie tray, I was inspired to try my hand at an UNO-card shaped veggie tray. You can be the judge of how successful I was, but honestly, I wasn’t 100% satisfied. It was OK, but not great. I’m open to suggestions on how to make it a little more obvious about what I was going for!

Here’s how I did it:

Wrap a cookie sheet with a large piece of black plastic (from a plastic table cloth), securing it in back with tape.
Set it in a “portrait” orientation (vertical).
Slice 1 1/2 large cucumbers in thin rounds. Cut the remaining 1/2 cucumber in sticks.
Cut the florets off about 3/4 of a head of cauliflower.
In the middle of the “tray”, shape a number 1 using the cucumber sticks.
Surround the “1″ with the cauliflower florets in a slanted oval.
Overlap the cucumber rounds above and below the cauliflower oval to finish out the card shape.

Homemade ranch dip is my usual accompaniment of choice for a veggie tray, but alas, my children are allergic to dairy, and I have not found a suitable dairy-free and soy-free way to make ranch dressing yet. So I opted for bean dip, instead, which was actually quite yummy! Since then, I’ve used the dip as a spread on sandwiches and wraps, and it’s equally tasty that way. I used Annie’s Eats White Bean Dip, except with pinto beans that I soaked and cooked instead of the canned cannellini beans.

Wild Card Fruit Tray

I was also not 100% satisfied with the final look of this one, at least in part because I couldn’t find any blueberries anywhere! I know it’s out of season, but typically you can find them somewhere, even if at a price. So I used red grapes, which were kind of purple-ish and therefore the closest thing I could find.

The Dollar Tree had a perfect little oval shaped plastic tray that worked pretty well to form the slanted oval shape found on UNO cards. The UNO wild card design I was working from (from a deck probably at least 10 years old) is just a slanted oval divided into four equal parts, each one a different color (in the pattern you see here.). The newer design actually has WILD written across the middle in big letters, which would clearly make it more obvious, but I’m not sure what you’d use to do that. Anyway, here’s how I made my Wild Card Fruit Tray:

Cover a cookie sheet with part of a black plastic table cloth, and secure in the back with tape.
Place an oval tray at a slant, centered lengthwise, on the cookie sheet (oriented “portrait” style, once again).
Mentally divide the oval into 4 equal parts: in the top left, place chopped strawberries; in the top right, grapes (or blueberries); in the bottom left, chopped pineapples; in the bottom right; green grapes (or kiwi).

To round out the menu, I also had planned a deli meat tray (for meals at home, I always buy nitrate-free uncured meats, but I wasn’t about to spring for enough of that to feed a whole crowd!), and bought a whole pound of ham. Alas, the party was held elsewhere because we didn’t have enough room in our apartment to fit everyone, and I left the ham at home. So now we are feasting (ahem!) on nasty store-bought deli ham. Oh well. I suppose we’ll live!

I also served potato chips because they are a big favorite of my Certain Little Someone, and I was pretty sure the rest of the guests would be just as happy to eat them as well.

With the exception of the bean dip, all of the things I made for this menu – the guacamole, salsa, bean dip, and fruit trays – came together very QUICKly the morning of the party. The beans did have to be soaked and cooked the day before, but very little of that was hands on time.

It was all EASY, certainly. Not exactly gourmet stuff, here!

This menu was relatively CHEAP. My goal was to spend less than $30 on the food, and I’m honestly not sure if I succeeded or not. The week of the party was so crazy, and I was just buying stuff randomly here and there when I had the chance, that I don’t even know exactly how much I paid. The produce was kind of expensive because it was mostly out-of-season, but in-season produce isn’t exactly conducive to finger foods (a hunk of raw parsnip anyone?). I’m guessing my total was between $30-$40. Not too shabby.

It was relatively HEALTHY, as well. With the exception of the potato chips, and would-be deli lunchmeat, it was fairly healthy spread. I didn’t even mind that my Certain Little Someone had 4 plates full! Some may quibble that the fruit was neither in-season, nor local, nor organic, but such folks likely have a much larger purse than I, and can afford to feed the starving hordes such luxury.