A New Orleans Night

Three weeks has (not surprisingly) flown by!  With work and school in full swing, and my weekends devoted to the cultiavtion of a social life, thing have stayed pretty busy, even as I do find myself with a fair amount of downtime as well - probably for the best. After all, balance is important!

As I had previously mentioned, I made a New Orleans(ish) dinner for a large group of friends and acquaintances last night.  Looking back on the evening, it is hard to believe the circuitous means by which I met this fantastic group of people.  I can only think how fortunate I am to have fallen into such a caring (albeit a bit crazy) group of friends!  At one point they were friends of friends of an acquaintance - now they have graciously adopted me into their Australian group (because everyone needs a token American) and I could not be happier with my lot.  The group, comprised of ten Aussies or so who all seemed to have started in Newcastle (a two hours drive from Sydney), met through various happenstances and have formed quite a bond.  They tend to have weekly gatherings, and this week it also happened to be one of their birthdays, so the party was extra special with cake and festivities.

I met up with Lisa and Sal in the afternoon on Saturday and we struck out for the grocery to get the rest of the ingredients for the meal that I had not already gotten at Paddy's.  From there we struck out for Kylie and Candice's house and after hellos to everyone and a bit of conversation we did cake for Rick's birthday.  Kylie and Candice (and possibly some other people) had made the most incredibly detailed dinosaur cake complete with a jelly river and erupting volcano.  We snacked on the cake and I headed to their kitchen to settle into cooking.  They have a fantastic kitchen and various people cycled through to help me with the dinner prep over the next hour and a half or so.

Candice and Leisa helping finish things up for dinner.

I ended up making shrimp etoufee, red beans and rice with (and without) sausage - for the vegans among the group, a big salad, and toasted bread to accompany.  I unintentionally made things a bit spicy for some of the Aussie taste buds, but with a bit of sour cream it seemed everyone was able to find something they enjoyed, and we had a wonderful mealtime.  Before dessert we undertook some craft time, something someone had seen on tv, and decorated shoes.  In general we made a massive mess, but it was well worth the fun that we got out of it!  I decided to make commentary on the anthropomorphic nature of shoes (tongues, eyes, etc..) and ended up with some of the more restrained shoes of the group!

My personified shoes.

With crafts time complete I headed back to the kitchen to cook bread pudding (which is not common down here, and is known as bread and butter pudding - really pretty accurate as I went through enough butter to pass as Paula Deen).  In general the result was well received and we carried on late into the evening.  For a few more pictures of the food follow the link I have sent out to facebook.

I lazied around this morning (it got pretty hot) and then ventured out this afternoon to meet a friend for a snack at Max Brenner (the chocolate restaurant which started in Israel and has locations in major cities across the world).  It was a welcome diversion from work and a great way to cap off the weekend.  I made it home a few minutes after the skies opened up, but the rain offered a nice foil to the heat of the morning.  Abs and I had some of the leftovers I ended up with from last night.  Now I am doing a bit of work and getting ready for the week...