Party Food on a Budget

My husbands birthday is coming up next month so I've all ready started stocking up on food and beverage items.

The theme of the food will be Italian. Everyone loves pasta and it is easy to make. I plan on making a "pasta bar" very similar in idea to one of my previous post about the taco bar. I plan to make my stuffed meatballs and home made Alfredo sauce recipes which have also been posted on this blog.

Since I have been couponing for quite a while I pretty much have all the pasta I could ever need. Pasta goes on sale at some store or another almost every week. Pasta sauces on the other hand are a little bit more difficult. I know a sale should appear anytime within now and the party date.

So, I plan on having a red tomato based sauce and an Alfredo sauce as the sauce options. For meat options, I plan on making the stuffed meatballs and grilled chicken breasts. Aldi sells chicken breast tenderloins which are sliced and ready to grill. They cook up in less than 10 minutes and I use them in practically every dish that calls for chicken breast.

For the condiments I plan on chopping up fresh basil, shredding up some mozzarella cheese, cooking some white mushrooms, dicing artichoke, and getting some grated Parmesan. That is all that I can think of condiment wise. If anyone else has ideas for Italian condiments please let me know.

Lastly, I need a couple bags of salad, multiple salad dressing options, and garlic or cheese bread. These items are not on sale this week but hopefully in a month I can score some great deals.

This week I started taking advantage of some of the sales going on at publix.

Crystal Lite drink mixes are sale at Publix buy one get one free for $3.99 plus there were some $1 off manufactures coupons in the June 12th edition of Smart Source. I can use two of these coupons dropping the price down to $1.99 for both. I could make a total of 24 quarts of juice with this deal (using both containers). I plan on enhancing the crystal lite possibly with some lime flavored soda, pureed strawberries, or maybe adding fruit cocktail mix into it like some people do with party punch.

As for the cake, I love to make cakes using cake mix. I under cook the cake slightly so it stays nice and moist. It so happens that this week Publix has Duncan Hines cake mixes buy one get one free for $1.83. Duncan Hines frosting is on sale for $1.29 each. Plus I have three manufactures coupons for 1 free Duncan Hines cake mix with the purchase of 2 Duncan Hines products. So I will be getting 5 boxes of cake mix and 4 jars of frosting for $6.99.

My plan is to make one round cake with the theme of the party (to be discussed in a future post), surrounded by cupcakes. Total cost thus far $8.98 worth in items stated above  + an estimated 4 boxes of pasta I bought at $0.14 each = $9.54 spent on food for a party of 50 thus far.