The Inaugural Event

We did it – Special K and I hosted our first dinner party at our casa on Sunday night. It was a combination of Easter dinner and my mom’s birthday dinner. I was trying a few recipes out that were new to me, so I was a smidge nervous that it would suck, but everything actually came out really nicely! We had spring mix with heirloom tomatoes and crumbled goat cheese, herb-roasted turkey with caramelized onion gravy, balsamic glazed carrots, green beans and red peppers with marjoram and almonds, and 4-cheese macaroni and cheese. Then I made a flourless chocolate cake with chocolate ganache for dessert (three cheers for our new Kitchen Aid stand mixer!), and I faked a blackberry coulis to go with it. Everyone seemed to enjoy dinner, and I was kind of impressed with the lightning speed with which it all came together. We got home from church at 1:30, I planned to eat at 7, and we made it by 7:20 or so – not too bad.

We were running around on Saturday doing all kinds of crazy errands, one of which was up to The Lodge, the place where we had our wedding, to pick up the top layer of our wedding cake. That cake was so good, I was not about to waste it… So we get there, and we’re driving home with it, and I start to think to myself “…it is not going to taste good after a year sitting in the freezer. It’s just not. But it will taste good if we just thaw it out and eat it now. That, in fact, would rock.”

So since I don’t really believe that you get bad luck based on when you eat a cake, Special K and I figured that the best thing we could do would be to make use of this fabulous cake, and order another (SMALL) one for our first anniversary. That seemed far more sensible.

Special K and I are both going to be running a lot this week. Especially because we still have a few slices of that flourless chocolate cake left, after my half-hearted attempts to give some of it away. (It was yummy…Special K would have been disappointed if I’d gotten rid of all of it.) It’s a good thing that I don’t cook like that all the time. I think I’m still full.