If Only Life Could Be a String of Dinner Parties

It's been an interesting past few weeks, punctuated by four dinner parties. First, my friend Brett came down from San Francisco and a few of us put together an impromptu dinner party in which Allison and I made the exact same dish - hers was pasta with squash and mine was pasta with zucchini. All of us ate pasta with a side of pasta. Luckily, she also sauteed kale, so there was something green on our plates as well.

Then there were the two Thanksgivings. Those were both great and extensively blogged about, at least by me - in the post below.

Thanksgiving was so much fun, in fact, that when I had to go up to San Francisco on short notice, I roped my friend into throwing a dinner party. Just a few days prior she had offered to cook me lasagna and throw me a party and order me a nice chocolate cake her husband got for his birthday - all in hypotheticals. Let's just say we made this happen, and that it was so much fun.

I introduced the other seven guests to a wonderful parlor game called "Telephone Pictionary" which involves writing phrases and drawing pictures and passing these phrases or pictures (alternating) down the line to be further translated into pictures and phrases. Let's just say we busted a gut or two laughing.

There was also a camping trip that happened somewhere between these dinner parties. I went in order to try out rock climbing, but the most memorable part for me ended up being the food we ate around the campfire. My camping friends are gourmet and they brought all of Whole Foods along with them, including fleur de sel, ginger, garlic bunches of kale, quinoa, pesto, TCHO chocolate for smores, multi-grain pancakes with syrup and butter, broccoli, cauliflower and brioche.

I tried to recreate this quinoa-pesto-kale concoction last night in a real kitchen with a real stove, yet somehow I failed. Tonight I will try to recreate the roasted brussel sprouts from my two Thanksgivings.



Is there a more perfect form of socializing than having your friends over for dinner? I think not.