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Another rule of thumb is 3 drinks every 2 hours. However, even if the reception lasts 6 hours, I doubt many of your guests are actually going to have 9 drinks (but who knows). Don't forget to factor in how much champagne will be served. You also need to know your family, are they going to stick with beer and wine regardless of available cocktails? I think sometimes hanging out in here skews ones perception of how much cocktail drinking goes on vs. other alcohol. That being said, there are lots of helpful websites that will give you an idea of the proportion of the different types of liquor and lists of mixers. Only shop somewhere with a return policy (if you can help it). Then you can over order to your worried hearts content, and return all the unopened extras.

As a kid in the southwest it was always called Muddy Buddies, but my boyfriend said he grew up calling it Puppy Chow (midwest). Regardless of what it's called, it's ridiculously good. I like it best plain, with the only crunch coming from the cereal. You definitely need enough powdered sugar, otherwise your hands get sooo messy from the chocolate/peanut buttery goodness.

Has anyone been to the Roosevelt Tavern? I haven't heard much besides they have very good pretzels and they have a special Four Peaks brew. Also, so far I've had the waffle with pepper bacon, the pancakes, the chili, the butter burger and the special of the day - which was a steak (forgot which cut) benedict. The stand-out winner was a the waffle with the bacon. That is some darn tootin' good bacon. I ended up dunking the potato chips from my dining companions sandwich into the cup to get to the last bit of maple. The chili, the special and the burger were all very good, however I was disappointed in the pancakes. The taste was just OK, but the texture reminded me of the Bisquick pancakes I used to eat as a child. It was tough and dry, and the addition of copious amounts of butter and maple syrup failed to rescue it. Another point of note is the service. We've been at varying times, from being completely full to just the early morning coffee drinkers and the service has always been very slow. It's not just the preparation of the food, I would wait an hour for the food to be made, but I don't like waiting 20 minutes for a coffee refill, to get my bill or to be even acknowledged with a "good morning". I don't know if it's just the experience that we've had; I usually don't hear many people talk about the service. I've never seen them run more than two servers a morning and I know that can be rough so I'm just chalking it up to a dearth of servers.

The worst cook isn't exactly family - yet. It's my future BIL. Like most people on this thread, he thinks he's a good cook, in fact he's proud of the fact that he's a "good cook", but well.... Most recently he decided to make homemade chicken and egg noodles, just like his grandmother from Indiana made. He didn't have a recipe, he's never made noodles before, but like he said "she whipped this up so fast, it'll be easy to make". To start, he mixed up the noodle dough, then decided they were too tough, so he added half a cup of water to the ball of dough. He tried to mix that in, then decided to add more flour and so and and so on. The resulting product was twice as big as it was supposed to be and looked nothing like dough. Then he rolled it out as thin as he thought is should be (about 1/2 an inch or so...ugh) and cut it into wide strips. He dropped those immediately into a pot of boiling broth (by way of cheap bouillon) and waited. And waited. Those suckers boiled forever. When they were done, I couldn't get past the first bite. They were still very doughy, salty, and tasted too much of flour. He said they tasted just like his grandmother's....and that makes me wonder about his grandmother. Another time he made pasta aioli for dinner. It was all he served that night, no vegetables, no salad, nuthin. The pasta had been cooked so long in the olive oil they were like they had never been boiled in the first place; it was a plate of oily, hard and unpleasantly crunchy pasta. There was also the time he made mashed potatoes...the potatoes were undercooked, with flecks of uncooked potato in the resulting mash. He thought he could solve the "texture" problem by adding 3x the milk and butter the potatoes could even hold. It was like eating a lumpy, raw potato soup. I wouldn't mind the kitchen blunders so much if he ever admitted he was a beginner cook, or was inexperienced, or anything! He continues to soldier on, a blind eye to his terrible creations. Otherwise he's a perfectly nice guy.