Gourmet Cooking

Friday afternoon at work I was discussing weekend plans with a patient.  She asked what I was doing that evening.  It just happened that one of my friends was hosting a Pinterest Party.  My patient was a member of an older generation so I had to describe the wonders of Pinterest to her-- Betty Crocker, Good Housekeeping, and the Farmers' Almanac all rolled into one resource, along with more frivolous items such as crafts and home decor, fashion ideas, and random workout suggestions.  I described that at a Pinterest Party a group gathers to actually complete some of the items that they have "pinned" in their virtual world.  In the past we have done sewing projects, homemade gifts for Christmas, and painted quotes on canvases.  Tonight our plan was to make some of the recipes that look delicious but are too much work to actually be practical to cook most of the time.  She thought this sounded like a wonderful idea and for once I think some one was a little jealous of my social life.

My friend Hillary hosts one of the gatherings every other month and it serves as a good time to catch up with everyone as well.  Rachel and Felicia were both able to come for the evening as well.  For appetizers we had fresh guacamole and hummus with carrots and sliced peppers.  We made bruschetta and crostinis.  My job was to grill the crostinis on the George Foreman-- this is gourmet I can handle.  The bruschetta was excellent.  I'm usually not a huge fan of straight up tomatoes but these were delightful.  The cream cheese spread may have helped because after all everything tastes better with cream cheese.  Our main entree was stuffed chicken.  This involved beating chicken breasts to smithereens which was a wonderful way to release some aggression for a few of us after a long week.  We stuffed the chicken with guac and cheese, bruschetta, or feta cheese and pesto.  Our side dish was twice baked potatoes.  My job was to scoop out the potatoes.  This tasked reminded me of making dugout canoes although it was decided that most of my "potato boats" wouldn't be sea worthy.  As a person whose goal is to spend less that 15 minutes of prep time on dinner each night most of these dishes were fairly time consuming but working with a group of friends and trying new and exciting "food adventures" made it a lot of fun.

The crown jewel of the evening was Rachel's homemade angel food cake.  I watched her at her craft-- sifting and sifting again to ensure the cake to be light and fluffy, making sure to get every detail just right.  When she presented the final product it was a lovely piece of art-- bright white and "it's so fluffy I'm gonna die".  We topped it off with fresh strawberries and freshly whipped cream.  Heavenly.

Our craft project for the evening was doing watercolors.  Over the past few months I have been learning the art of watercolor and have been using watercolors to make greeting cards.  I gave a few quick tips to remember to make watercolors fun and not so frustrating since I have had plenty of frustration with this medium recently.  It was fun to see how quickly everyone caught on and how we each have our unique tastes.  The beauty of getting together to work on a craft is that we can work on something while talking.  Most of the time we lose track of time which results in my husband calling to see if I am ever going to come home.  I actually left right on time this time and even brought him a slice of angel food cake as a piece offering for leaving him at home by himself.  Omnia Vincit Amor.