Give Me Some Food

The times when you have so much to write about are also the times when you have no time to pick up a pen...excuse me...sit down at the computer. I am in the middle of my cooking marathon but thought I could take a water break to blog.

I hurried down to my parents' house on the 23rd which was also Felix's birthday- Felix is one of those people who doesn't want anyone to know it's his birthday- so I wasn't allowed to tell anyone it was his birthday. I, however, have much cause to celebrate- cradle robber that I am- Felix is 13 months younger than I making one month of the year where he seems two years younger than me! I always rejoice when that age difference goes back to one year.

I had a huge task which was to make a chocolate pie for this potluck where the biggest fans of my blog would be: my parents' friends from college and their kids. The pressure was on and I ran into my first problem. My mom's only pie pan happened to be at my apartment in San Francisco. Damn. I could either pick a shallow wide metal tart pan or a deep narrow glass tart pan.

Michael (later a guest at said party) was over to pick up Dad to go buy wine for that night.

"Michael, which pan do you think will hold more pie?"

"Remember your math- pi r round!" (like pi r sqared...he thought that was pretty funny.)

Anyway, I ended up using the...hmmm...right now I have no idea which one I used...oh right...the glass one. Mom told me to use the glass one. I did. It worked.

When we got to the party I got a glass of gingerale+pomagranate juice (great holiday combo) and talked to some good friends that I hadn't seen in awhile. Here is Karen with her Spinach-Artichoke dip:

And here is Linda's tomato aspic (ha! I rhyme! sort of.)

I had no idea what tomato aspic was except that it looked like watermelon jello to me (and the guests had been joking over email that someone should bring a tomato aspic and then Linda actually did). I was a little hestitant to eat tomato jello but this was fantastic. There was a seafood salad on the side so it was like a glorified shrimp cocktail for me.

Here is the chocolate pie I made out of the January issue of BA:

But first I had to make the whip cream for the topping ( we had to get cream on the way over and Dad was trying to convince me to just get that horrid spray bottle of whipped nar-nar! Ruin my pie! no!) So I whipped some cream which meant Jessica and I got to lick the beaters:

Felix was a total traitor in this whole process because he didn't have a piece of my chocolate pie. Granted there were other temping desserts to choose from- a whiskey cake with chocolate icing, rice pudding, and a cranberry apple pie. He would consume nothing else except this decadent cranberry apple pie! Here he is, the Benedict Arnold of desserts: