Dinner party appetizers, bring it on.

A break from cupcakes. A few appetizers for a dinner party.

Sounds simple enough, but this threw me into a bit of a tizzy. A dinner party at my boss's house with with five co-workers and spouses. We work in an ad agency, we are accustomed to good food, really good food. We use every excuse to take clients to the best restaurants. Hell, we've even carefully planned airport delays around dinner -- Newark to Baltimore by way of San Francisco, not a problem. There is a great restaurant in the San Fran airport. But I digress.

Each of the co-workers was assigned part of the meal. My assignment was "an appetizer." At face value, simple right? Much less pressure than dessert, yeah? Just like the Ritz crackers ads, some spray cheese and parsley and its all good. Not so much. In a short two weeks I had amassed 152 potential recipes. I've always been a bit of an over achiever and very competitive, but showing up with this many apps might "alarm" my hosts. Besides, I'd end up with oven issues. I needed help.

I reached out to several food friends and Kit from Mango and Ginger talked me down off the ledge. She even threw a few more recipes into the mix. In the end, I couldn't arrive at a single appetizer, but ended up an acceptable three. What can I say, I like odd numbers.

• Parmesan cups with goat cheese mousse, from the French Laundry cookbook by way of Mango and Ginger. I have to give myself mad props for the presentation, I had the perfect serving dish. Cool and delicious! (I did have some technical issues putting these together at the host' house, my pastry tip popped off the pastry bag of mousse, my intention was to a tad fancier.)

• Wonton crackers with fresh horseradish cream, smoked salmon and caviar. I used a cookie cutter to cut the wonton wrappers. Very festive and again easy. Finding fresh horseradish for the cream was a bit of hunt, next time I would use the jarred.
  

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• Truffled popcorn. A huge hit. Thank you again, Mango and Ginger for pointing me to Alice Q. Foodies's blog. Once I scored the truffled salt, a bit of a hunt, this was quick and wonderful. Besides, who doesn't love popcorn? (Don't you love the old school air popcorn maker? Being a bit of a pack rat pays off!)