Shark Party!!

For my totally adult mid-30's birthday party this year, I decided I wanted to use our repurposed backyard movie screen to watch horrible shark movies - original plan: Dinoshark and Sharktopus. I would still love to watch those one day, but what we actually watched was a totally legally downloaded version of the much hyped summer movie of 2013, SHARKNADO!! And it was AMAZING....

For this wonderful event, we had to have some fun theme snacks and decorations!  First, we printed off "posters" from this amazing Tumblr and decorated our "theater lobby" (aka living room). We served Sharkaritas (otherwise known as normal margaritas but with plastic sharks floating in them!) and Dogfish Head beer!

We also had shark shaped cookies because my mom recently gave me a random assortment of oceanic cookie cutters which worked out quite handily! I attempted to make surfboards with bite marks (this took a lot of work, I'm telling you!) but the cookies ended up too puffy and looked like cartoon commas, so I was a bit sad and those were at the bottom on the cookie jar and are not pictured here :)

For the piece de resistance, we served "chum" - ceviche in a bucket! It actually turned out amazingly tasty, I was quite proud of not giving anyone food poisoning. It was surprisingly easy to make!

Ingredients

 

2 lbs firm fish (I used snapper)

1/2 C lemon juice (~4 lemons)

1/2 C lime juice (~4 limes)

2 containers of pico de gallo (tomatoes, onions, cilantro, peppers, citrus juice)

1 avocado

Salt and pepper to taste

Serve with tortilla chips

Cut the fish up into little bite-sized pieces and mix with the pico and lemon and lime juices. Cover and let sit in the refrigerator for an hour. Take it out, stir it to be sure all of the fish is exposed to the citrus juice because this is how it cooks! Cover it again and let sit at least 3 more hours in the refrigerator. Prior to serving, cut up the avocado and stir it in. To make it sharky, put it in a bucket (since it's sitting out, we put that in a container of ice to keep it chilled), and have 2 sharks circling the chum just like in the wild! ;)

\

Everyone brought lawn chairs and hung out in our yard watching this glorious cinematic masterpiece! It was quite a wonderful birthday party!!