Mini Chicken Pot Pies

It finally seems like Fall is beginning to arrive in Southern California and we are excited for all the warm comfort foods that come with the season! 

We made these mini chicken pot pies for a client who wanted nothing but bite size comfort classics. We loved the way they looked and tasted and were easy to make! 

First you will need 3" Mini Tart Pans, Puff Pastry (frozen sheets are ok), and your chicken filling.

The longest part of the process will be making your chicken filling - we made a very large batch but we'll give you the ingredients we used to give you a good idea! 

 

* Cook chicken breast meat - it can be bone in or bone out - You can also even purchase diced-precooked meat to speed up the process. If you are cooking your meat cook it in the stove top over water and add salt with some raw onion and a few garlic cloves. Save the stock when your chicken is done!

* Sautee Onions, Carrots & Celery with some Salt & Pepper to your taste

* Make a rue with equal parts flour and butter - this will help thicken your filling

* Have some Heavy Cream on hand as well and some Chicken Flavor Bouillon (cubes or powder is fine) 

* When your chicken is cooked and diced, heat your saved stock and add your sauteed onion, celery & carrots (you can also add peas) along with your some rue to help thicken it up - as that is simmering and your stock is getting thicker also add some heavy cream then add your diced chicken. As all that heats together and becomes more flavorful add some chicken bouillon and keep stirring. Then  once it's done it should be thick and creamy. Let it cool. Then we are ready to assemble chicken pot pies!

In your 3" Tart Pans, add the cooled filling. Once all your tins are full we suggest sticking them in the freezer for a few minutes to your filling settles even better and applying your puff pastry crust is even easier.

Roll out your puff pastry sheets (can be store bought or made from scratch) and cut them into about 3.5 inch circles and cover your tins!

After you apply your dough on top make a crust by pinching the sides with your fingers or press down with a fork. There's no right or wrong way! Once they are all done brush the tops with an egg wash.

Bake them at 350 for about 20-30 minutes until the crust is golden brown!

Let cool and enjoy!

You're left with a delicious tin of flaky goodness!

Fiesta Themed 100th Birthday Party

We catered a very special birthday party for a gal who turned 100 years young! She loves Mexican food and music; so naturally her family decided to throw her a big fiesta to celebrate her special day!

 

Together with the birthday girl's family we planned a colorful color palate and picked an appropriate menu for the occasion. We arranged for their rentals through A Rental Connection and helped them decide on what special drink should be served for the day. Of course, we picked margaritas!  

Here are some pictures for your inspiration! 

 

Don't the tables look pretty and colorful! The host arranged for the centerpieces herself. They bought dollar store frames and painted them in various pretty bright colors and filled them with various pictures of the birthday girl throughout different stages in her life. They also rented serapes and placed cute small maracas and sombreros around the center of the table for a fun touch. 

We also loved how the host filled the patio with "papel picado" (the pretty colorful mexican tissue paper banners) and bright pom poms! 

For everything related to food and drinks we provided special touches to go in theme with the hosts decor (which we discussed before hand to make sure we coordinated!). We went to Downtown Los Angeles into the Olvera Plaza and found lots of cute things to use for this party. Among them we found authentic "papel picado" in different sizes as well as sombreros, tiny serapes, Mexican dreidels, small maracas, and beautiful fabric that reminded us of Mexican serapes. 

For the bar, we added papel picado and designed a menu that paid tribute to Mexican bingo (La Loteria). 

 Ok so how fun is that patron bottle and corona bottle at the bar below! We had these empty bottles from a previous event and thought it would be so cute to use them as flower vases for the bar! A great way to up-cyle something that would have otherwise been thrown out! We also added some paper straws - because who doesn't like a colorful straw with their drink?

The host purchased these pretty colorful plastic margarita glasses at party city. We think they added a fun pop of color and made drinking the margaritas more fun!

For the bar, we had our captain and bartender Anne make lime, strawberry and mango margaritas. We also served beer, wine and soft drinks. The host provided all of the drinks and liquor. We made fresh strawberry and mango puree at our kitchen for the flavored margaritas.

 The margaritas looked soo good! There were some guests who didn't drink so Anne made plenty of virgin margaritas too, they were like a delicious icy fruit smoothie - even the kids loved them! Especially on a warm day like the one we had.

What also made the atmosphere very fun for this party was that many dressed in the spirit of the theme. The host even had serapes, sombreros, and mustaches for everyone to use.

Also adding to the fun atmosphere was a very talented trio playing the birthday girl's favorite music. Their name is Trio Chapala - the owner's name is Lazaro and is very kind! They don't have a website but they can be reached by phone at 323-683-1779. They sounded amazing! We will have a video uploaded for you to see and hear them on our facebook page!

The birthday girl danced with her son, she was so happy and doesn't even look 100!

Now to the food! We had a cocktail hour where we served our mango & brie quesadillas with fruit salsa.

And a newer addition to our menu, mini pork tamale bites! We served these with a ranchera sauce for guests to dip them in. Of course they were a hit!

For dinner, the family selected our soft taco bar with shredded chicken and beef as well as lots of toppings and warm corn and flour tortillas. We also included pinto and black beans, spanish rice, cheese enchiladas, a tossed green salad with black beans and corn with cilantro dressing as well as fresh fruit.


How great does the buffet look? We provided all the linens and decor for the food including the flowers. We also added the celebrate banner and papel picado on the wall for a pop of color!

The tiny papel picado was so cute! We had to buy it when we saw it and we tied it to some bamboo skewers to stick in our flowers the guests loved all the details!

For the flowers, we went to the LA Flower Market of course and selected lots of different bright flowers.

Our captain and creative director Rebecca and our server extraordinaire Giselle ready to fill your plate!

Here's a closer look at the food:

 Cheese Enchiladas with Black Olive Garnish

 Tossed Green Salad with Corn & Black Beans - We served this with Ranch and our Cliantro Dressing pictured below.

 Shredded Beef

 Shredded Chicken

 Our Pinto Beans, Spanish Rice and Black Beans

We had lots of different toppings! Gucacamole, Green Onions and White Onions (pictured below), Sour Cream, Shredded Cheddar Cheese, Salsa Verde, Cilantro, Chunky Salsa, Diced Tomatoes and Shredded Lettuce. We also included our Home-Made Tortilla Chips.

Here's one more picture of the buffet!

We made the food labels - we thought it would be a great idea to use Mexican Loteria cards as our inspiration!

The host provided lots of different desserts and birthday cake of course! We helped her arrange them and we provied the pretty colorful blue linen and made a dessert menu.

Everyone had a great time and we had an even greater time catering this event. It's events like this that help us to look at life with lots of appreciation!

DIY: Round Paper Fans!

We love pretty and easy do-it-yourself projects! This one will help spruce up any space you are using for your event! These paper fans also go by paper rosettes and can be found at craft stores like Paper Source or Michael's to purchase. If you want to save some money and have an array of colors and patterns to choose from then make them yourself! We'll show you all the steps in today's blog post!

 

Let's get started!

First to make the large paper fans you will need:

12"x12" Paper
A Paper Trimmer OR Scissors
Scoring Board OR Your Hands will do just fine!
Hot Glue Gun with Hot Glue Sticks

To make the large fans...

which will be 12" in diameter we need 3 pieces of cardstock or paper in the same color/pattern.

Trim the edges of your paper if there is a barcode edge like ours. If not then start folding or scoring your paper into an accordion with spacing at every 1".

Once your three pieces are folded like this, fold them in half. This is what you'll end up with - look at the pic below!

Use your glue gun to join the centers together first, then glue the edges together and join them!

At this point, once you're almost done gluing if you want to hang your fans instead of taping them to a wall we recommend gluing a string or a very thin wire (like floral wire) to this center part before gluing it shut. This way you can nicely hang your fans.

To make the smaller fans...

Which will be 6 inches in diameter use 1 piece of 12"x12" card stock cut into 4 pieces.

Here are our squares!

Fold each square into an accordion and glue the centers like we did with our large fans!

Again, glue your edges together to form your fan!

This is what it looks like when it's all done!


Hope our picture explanations have been easy to follow! Show us your creations! Hashtag #henriscatering on Instagram!


We hope to have some free printables up on the blog from the bridal shower we planned and designed for your use very soon! Keep checking in with us! Follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay posted!

Under the Sea Themed Bridal Shower

We hosted, designed, planned, coordinated and catered a bridal shower for a very special bride-to-be.

The only thing we had guiding us as we started the planning process was the fact that the bride wanted pastel versions of her wedding colors and that somehow she wanted a mermaid in the mix. Apart from those requests, we had full creative freedom to design to our hearts content. The first thing that we made to help us get started with everything else, were the invitations, which our creative director and captain, Rebecca, designed. We wanted to incorporate a mermaid into her invites in a very subtle way that did not scream “children’s party!” So Rebecca drew mermaids on Adobe Illustrator using a charcoal pencil effect and then added some watercolor streaks throughout the background. We used the font, Janda Elegant Handwriting (which is free!) in the invitation and throughout ALL the signage we made.  We lined the envelopes using some gorgeous paper we found at Paper Source and were able to incorporate this same paper throughout other elements we used in the party. 

Something we get asked a lot is: how do you get started when you are planning a party?

Whenever Rebecca and I are planning a party the first decisions we make before moving forward with anything is the theme and color palate. Then, the next thing we make before anything else is the invitations. We find that for us, it helps us set the tone of the party and from there, we can make sure to design everything else that follows cohesively. 

The menu we put together with the help of the bride who wanted a light mix of finger foods. 

Appetizers: Barbeque Glazed Meatballs, Chicken Brochette with Lemon & Garlic, Crab & Gouda Stuffed Mushrooms and Split Pea Soup Shots with Grilled Cheese.

Main Course: Finger Sandwiches – Cucumber Dill, Curried Chicken Salad & Egg Salad, Mini Salami & Turkey Sandwiches, Broccoli Salad, Red Potato Salad & Fresh Fruit.

Dessert: Chocolate Chip and Cranberry Orange Scones with Devonshire Cream, Lemon Curd & Preserves, Decorated Cookies, Fruit Tarts, Chocolate Covered Strawberries, Lemon Bars, plus home-made chocolates and chocolate lollypops. 

Drinks: We made delicious sangria – the recipe which we will share in full detail in a later blog post – which we stationed in a dispenser for guests to help themselves. We also served margaritas: mango, strawberry & lime plus Pina Coladas & Mimosas. We had our bartender Eileen dressed casually for this, she even wore a little mermaid blouse in the spirit of the party – which the bride loved! 

The Games:

We planned out five games for this bridal shower. We drew lots of inspiration from Pinterest to help us narrow down what to do! 

Here they are listed:

You can’t say the bride’s name. We had rings out in a bowl and told guests to put one on. If they heard someone say the bride’s name they could remove their ring. At the end of the party, whoever had the most rings won a prize.

How well do you know the bride? The classic questionnaire which we modified a little to suit the bride’s personality. Highest scoring person wins the prize. 

Toss the Bouquet. This is basically hot potato. Rebecca hand-made paper flowers and placed those on long wooden sticks we had from Michael’s. The bride controlled the music with her back to the players and what was nice is that she kept the bouquet after as a favor to use at her rehearsal. 

Wedding Dress Design Challenge.  A team game – we had teams of 5 people – where the challenge is to use one of your teammates as a model and make a wedding dress using only tissue paper and 1 roll of tape. We gave our two teams only 3 minutes to complete! The bride picked the winning group by selecting which dress she liked best.

What’s in your purse? We made a list of items and listed the items for guests to hear one by one, at the end whoever had the most items from the list won a prize.

DIYs we made for this party were:

Invites, Signage, From Miss to Mrs. banner, Bride-to-Be chair banner, Crepe Paper Streamer Backdrops (Garage Door, Dessert Station, and Photo booth Backdrop), PVC Pipe Photo booth, Photo booth Props, Floral Centerpieces + Buffet Arrangements, Round Paper Fans, Tissue Paper Pom-Poms, Party Favor Bags – filled with nail polish, Initial Wooden Letters (we painted and glittered), Paper Flower Bouquet (for toss the bouquet game), Chocolate Lollypops and Sea Shell Chocolates plus a How Well do You Know the Bride Questionnaire to match the party. We are hoping to have some specific DIY posts for a few of these elements as well as some FREE printables for your personal use soon! 

A note about the centerpieces: We were inspired by coral reefs when figuring out a color scheme and flowers to use for this. We loved how they turned out!

To see the happiness on the bride’s face when she saw all of the details the day of her shower made it all worth it! That’s the most rewarding part of being in this business.

Vendor Credits:

Rentals – A Rental Connection

Decorated Cookies – Bella Donna Special Events

Fruit Tarts – Sarah J Pastries

Everything else…..Henri’s Exquisite Catering!