housewarming party extraordinaire

When you move having a housewarming party really makes you feel settled in and that you have a warm house. We invited 30 people, and probably 25 showed up so it was a full house with a mix of friends from work and church.

We made pulled pork with homemade BBQ sauce, coleslaw (Thanks Mom Innes for the recipe! People loved it and asked for the recipe) and a plethora of smoothies. As one flavour ran out, we would make another one.

We started with Lime-razzy, then strawberry-mango, then orange-pineapple-banana, ending up with dad Innes' special: chocolate-marshmallow-grape!

With the chocolate-marshmallow-grape, we made it into a game: We gave everyone a taste, and they had to write down what they thought that the flavours were. 4 people got 2/3 right but no one got all three - 3 of them said chocolate and grape, only 1 said chocolate and marshmallow. So we drew the winner (who got a tolberbone bar) out of those 4 people and gave everyone else a small chocolate bar (someone brought them as housewarming gifts, so why not) as a prize for trying. People where guessing everything from Chocolate covered cherries (quite common guess) to Tootsie rolls (very common) to my favorite "deliciousness, mmmm and chocolate"! Someone else said chocolate and magic. But everyone agreed that this flavour combo is quite good.

All the Innes' know the story behind it, but for those who don't this is the story behind it: A number of years ago he went to Peter's Drive In in Calgary, with a bunch of friends who dared each other to come up with the weirdest flavour combination (Peter's something like 30 flavour options). Dad Innes said Chocolate Marshmallow grape. He won the dare, and the milkshake was surprisingly good, so has became a favorite ever since.

BTW, the ratio that we came up with is: 4 cups ice cream, 1-2 cups milk (depending on how thick you like it), 3 tablespoons grape concentrate (we found one that is almost a jam, just not as thick), 5 tablespoons sweetened chocolate powder (ie Nestle Quick) and 5 tablespoons marshmallow cream (we made our own, really simple to do). Adjust ratios as needed. Of course, some of the ingredients in Canada will be different then in China, so the ratios could be a little different. You'll have to play around with it until it tastes right - Chocolate with grape with a hint of marshmallow - no flavour should overpower any other, but if you were to order the flavours it would be Chocolate, Grape, than Marshmallow. This is definitely going in our family memories cookbook.

Everyone had a good time which made us happy!