Expensive looking party platters on a budget - AmericaNowNews.com

Party platters on a budget

If you've ever dreamed big about entertaining and impressing guests at home, get those invitations ready - food pro Devin Alexander has some thrifty tips to make your next dinner party look like it cost a fortune!

There's no reason you have to have a boring veggie platter. One of Devin's favorite ways to dress things up is to decorate mushrooms. All you do is press the tip of the knife into the mushroom, do a small indentation and continue. In the video, you'll notice she spaces this uniformly around the mushroom - the end product looks like an antique doorknob.

And if you ever wondered how they get those cool ridges in a cucumber - that's even easier. All you do is take a regular dinner fork and score a cucumber starting from one end, going from all the way to the other, trying to stay in a straight line. Then do it again all the way down the cucumber until you make it all the way around. Then you slice the cucumber.

Another really easy way to dress up your table is to consider using fancy glasses. Potato salad on a plate – not so great - but put it in a Martini glass and it can take on a whole new life. Just spoon it in and top it off with a grape or cherry tomato.

Another way to use fancy glasses is to serve juice in them - they do this at a lot of fancy hotels.

For desserts and sweets, give those platters a little drizzle of chocolate.

These simple ideas should inspire you to think outside the plate. And the best part, they'll cost you nothing.

Copyright 2011 America Now.  All rights reserved.

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