Well, here we are again. The beginning of yet another year and with that begins the annual parties, birthday celebrations, holidays and anything else you might celebrate throughout the year. This year I will be kicking off my 2010 party season with a bang and what better way to start that off, but with a Super Bowl Party. With fingers crossed, hopefully your favorite team will make it into the Super Bowl, but in the event they don’t, you can still have a fun and festive get together with friends and family to watch the events of the day unfold.
For this year’s party, I plan on spending more time with my guests and less time in the kitchen. In order to accomplish that and ensure my guests still have a great time and good food to feast on, I went for fun appetizers that I can prepare in my crock-pot. This way they can have fun finger food that is not only good to eat but easy to prepare and I am not spending my time in the kitchen cooking.
To get the ball rolling on planning my party, I started with foodGizmo to determine what to serve my guests. I began by searching for slow cooker appetizer recipes; from there I selected the recipes I would like to prepare, added those to my menu and created my grocery list. I spent a total of 10 minutes pulling all of that together, WOW that was a time saver having all of that in one spot.
The dishes I selected to prepare were:
Slow Cooker Pulled Pork,
Asian-Spiced Chicken Wings and
Creamy Artichoke Parmesan Dip. Given that the game isn’t for a couple of weeks I decided to test the recipes out on a group of pretty picky eaters: my family. I am happy to report that all of these recipes got huge thumbs up across the table. When the kids go back for seconds, you know you have a winner on your hands.
The first dish I prepared was
Slow Cooker Pulled Pork. I put a bit of a spin of this recipe. To keep in the appetizer theme, I served the pork on mini buns rather than regular hamburger buns to make Pulled Pork Sliders. This actually turned out to be perfect for the younger ones in the group. The pork is slow cooked in root beer to give it great flavor. About 30 minutes before serving, pull the pork out, shred it, mix in the BBQ sauce (in this case I used Stubbs Original BBQ sauce), returned the shredded pork and BBQ mixture to the crock-pot and continued cooking for another 30 minutes. I served that with corn and cole slaw to finish it off as a meal.
The next recipe,
Asian-Spiced Chicken Wings, also got 5 stars from the family. That recipe took me a total of about 10 minutes to prepare. I browned the wings under the broiler while I prepared the sauce. Once the wings were browned, I put the wings and sauce in the crock-pot on high to cook for 3 hours. When I put the wings on the dinner table they “flew” off the platter and there were many return trips by the group until all were gone.
The last recipe I decided to give a try was the
Creamy Artichoke Parmesan Dip. Talk about easy and good, even the pickiest one in the family couldn’t get enough of this. This particular recipe took a total of 10 minutes to prepare and it was ready in 2 hours. All I had to do was chop artichoke hearts, mix with mayonnaise, mozzarella and parmesan cheese, spoon it in my 1 ½ qt crock-pot and cook. I served this with crackers and tortilla chips. Yet another favorite I have been asked to prepare again.
With these fast, good, and easy to prepare recipes I know I will achieve my goal of spending more time at the festivities and less time in the kitchen and still provide my guests with good eats! By the way – these recipes would be great prepared in the
Crock-Pot Trio Cook and Serve Slow Cooker. It is the perfect cooking tool to serve, and keep warm, your Super Bowl Appetizers.
I hope you like these dishes as much as we did.
Don’t forget to have fun at the party!
dGizmo