Champagne Chicken

Saturday was my birthday party … Sunday is the cleanup.

I didn’t have many people over, but they were all good friends. Most of the recovery was due to Jody’s cooking … very tasty, but it touched the surface of many dishes. Jody splurged and made his champagne chicken for the guests. This is the dish he says made his wife marry him.

Jody is a great friend … but I don’t think he could do anything to a chicken that would make me want to marry him. But that’s just me.

Jody also splurged and bought me two Henckel knives as a present. Combined with the chef’s knife my mother-in-law bought me, this gives me all the kinves I need to really cook. This was confirmed by Jody, an ex-chef turned stock broker. He feels a chef needs three knives … chef’s knife, paring knife and a santuko knife (Japanese knife for meat and fish). These sharp instruments of cleaving are my new kitchen centerpiece. Now I need to get better at cooking.

Saturday is when I started to merge two sets of friends. Thomas and Jody, part of my DragonCon cadre, were introduced to Alice, Darryll and Marie. Suzanne and I met these three at a Three Weird Sisters concert in Conyers. Since then we’ve traded dinners, home improvement stories, and countless hours of random conversation. They’re just odd enough to qualify as my friends.

The friend integration project went smoothly. Thomas told everybody about his impending entry into the Navy. Alice talked about the constant rennovations to her turn of the century home. Jody warned us about the diet-busting powers of his cooking. We watched movies, ate, drank, talked, and stayed up entirely too late. Nobody got too terribly drunk. Nobody danced on a table with a lampshade on their head. It was probably more of a gathering than a party … but it was fun. It was definitely worth the tower of dishes that currently reside in my kitchen.

Getting older like this isn’t such a bad thing. I should it do it more often. On second thought, scrap the constant aging bit … I should get together with friends more often.