Layered Pasta Salad

A few weeks ago my sister and I co-hosted a Thirty-One party at our mom's house. We were very excited for a reason to plan a get together and put some Pinterest ideas to good use.

I chose two "pretty" Pinterest recipes that would serve as table decor and food. The recipe for the Layered Pasta Salad is below and the Puff Pastry Sandwiches are here.

Layered Pasta Salad


What you Need:
3 cups shredded lettuce
Start by adding the shredded lettuce in a glass serving bowl or trifle bowl.
In a small bowl, combine mayonnaise, sour cream, and Dijon mustard.
Cover and refrigerate for several hours or overnight.


1 1/2 cups uncooked small shell macaroni
1 Tbsp canola oil
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1 cup chopped, fully cooked, ham
1 cup chopped hard salami
1 bag of frozen peas, thawed
1 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup sour cream
2 tsp Dijon mustard, or spicy brown mustard
1 cup (4 oz) shredded Colby Jack cheese

Directions:
Cook the macaroni according to package directions. Drain and rinse the pasta with cold water. Drizzle with oil, and toss to coat the noodles so they don't stick together.

Add the macaroni on top of the lettuce.
Layer in the chopped ham, chopped salami, and thawed peas.

Spread mayonnaise mixture over the peas.

Just before serving, sprinkle cheese on the top layer.

Golf Tournament

Goodwill Industries of Denver hosted its 12th Annual Driving for Diplomas Golf Classic at the Colorado Golf Club in Parker, CO on August 25th. This is one of my biggest events of the year and always requires a lot of work, but spending the day on a golf course isn't bad ;) 

The clubhouse

The silent auction

Each year at our tournament we offer our golfers a gift card for Oakley product. 

This is our pop up shop for the morning. 

The only picture of me from the day. I'm the one in the middle with neon pink running shoes. 

That's a lot of sponsor signs!

Try as I might, I can't control Mother Nature, which was evident at the golf tournament. An afternoon storm rolled in and caused the golfers to quit golfing an hour early. As I was running around trying to make sure our dinner celebration would be ready early, the clubhouse was struck by lightning. The lightning caused the fire alarm to go off and we had to let everyone know to stay inside even though the alarm was blaring because it was safer inside than out.  

If that wasn't exciting enough, the fire department showed up with two firetrucks and an ambulance to inspect the building. I had 6 (hot) firemen walking around the clubhouse checking out smoke detectors. 

Even with the craziness at the dinner, we raised more money than last year for our youth programs!

Goodwill Industries of Denver: Home Store Grand Opening

Like it has been all summer, it's been a while between my posts.  But I've been way busy with work. Really I have. In August and September I had two store Grand Openings and a golf tournament. But now I finally have time to catch up on blog posts.

In early August Goodwill Industries of Denver opened a Home Store in South Denver (located at 8230 S. Colorado Blvd. Centennial, CO 80122 in case you feel the need to visit) that sells furniture and home decor items.  The grand opening was a huge success and the furniture donations at the store still continue to be amazing finds at great prices. See the photos below if you don't believe me ;)

Stuart Davie, Goodwill CEO, and John the Store Manager cutting the ribbon

The crowd of customers that lined up outside

My favorite part of the day was having three amazing companies there to give ideas to the shoppers on ways to up-cycle some of the older furniture pieces that we have. 

Rit Dye had a table set up with ideas on using their dyes to update an old piece of furniture. They dyed that green table on the left and everything they wore! They also gave me a booklet of ideas and some sample dyes, look for posts with that later. 

Re for your home was there to give a tutorial on using Annie Sloan Chalk Paints to update items. They had a full table all day long!

 Here's just a few examples of the furniture we had.