Friends, Food, & Alcohol - Hoorah!

Last night, Darr and I had some friends over (i.e., Ann, Raymond, Sara, and Josh) for dinner, drinks, and a night of conversation. My recollection this morning is a little hazy - we polished off three bottles of wine and one bottle of champagne between the five of us, not to mention individual drinks including beer and hard liquor - but there were a lot of different topics covered over the course of the evening, which began around 6:15pm and lasted until just before or just after 1am. Politics, travel, Starwood points (Darr and I have got to get cracking on earning these), baby stuff - the one of us that wasn't drinking is pregnant and set to drop mid-July, work (ugh!), movies, treehouses...you get the point, we talked about a lot of different crap.

We tried some new recipes, always a nerve-wracking venture, and most of it turned out okay. Let's see, we started with mushroom risotto, which I thought was fantastic but Darren described as "okay". (He's not much of a mushroom guy.) This was followed by braised lamb shanks with oranges and olives (Stinco di Agnello con Aranci e Olive) - weird, I know, but totally tasty. Then we had my disaster of a dessert rhubard and strawberry fools. My rendition looked nothing like the picture in the magazine (Did they forget the puree step?). And I must make a mental note for the future to not try to construct this dessert in wine glasses after drinking copious amounts of wine. Not pretty. Then we served some rather oddly shaped handmade chocolate truffles. A short while later we broke out the Cheddar Beer Kettle Chips, because as party rule #32 of the How to Host a Party, Win Friends, and Influence People handbook states: "A party isn't a party if you don't serve chips."

Darr's got a bit of a headache this morning and I'm working to combat the creation of one so we're both drinking large amounts of water to rehydrate. And because our kitchen still has some residual dirty items left to clean, we're heading out to Bertie Lou's, our favorite local breakfast haunt, to get something in our bellies.