My mother was about 6 months from turning 100, and I wanted to make it special. I wanted to plan a big centenarian celebration for her, with all of her friends and family in attendance. It was going to be a pretty big deal. 

I’d set the date and invite people first, and do the actual planning second. Her birthday was late spring, so I planned to hold it at my home since I had a nice common area with French doors that led to an outside patio. It would be perfect to accommodate everyone. 

I scheduled a dinner out with my siblings to commence the planning. We decided against catering, and agreed that we would handle the food. There were 5 of us, so between us and our children, which brought our numbers up to 17, we’d be in good shape. 

We came up with a nice menu that had 4 courses, and actually had a sit down dinner. My mom’s generation would appreciate that. We planned to serve the appetizers more in a cocktail hour fashion, and start the dinner afterwards. It gave everyone more time to mingle beforehand. 

My sister brought up a good point, saying that we could use food processors to start prepping some of the things ahead of time. I didn’t have a food processor, and my 2 brothers didn’t either. My sister sent us a link to KitchenWorksinc, where we could purchase authentic Cuisinart products. 

I figured it would make sense to invest in something good, since I did a good amount of high volume cooking pretty often. I ended up opting for the Cuisinart custom 14 food processor. I was excited to give this a shot. 

We started about a week early with certain things that we could store and freeze. It was literally the 5 of us prepping food with our food processors in my house. I never imagined I’d have a scene like that taking place in my kitchen. 

We continued 2 days before the big party and prepped anything else that we possibly could. We left the finishing touches for the morning of, and hardly had any work to do at that point. It was great because it turned out there were a couple of things that we forgot, so it wasn’t a huge loss to have someone go and get the last minute things we needed.

The party was amazing; our mom was so surprised and it was apparent that she felt really special. Plus, we got to spend quality time with her and the family, rather than being stuck in the kitchen. 

My siblings and I were all very happy with our decision to have this party for our mom’s 100th birthday. At that stage in life, we have no idea how much time she has left so it meant so much to us to pull it off. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without our Cuisinart food processors.