A post in which it is a birthday party!

I went to the gym again last night. I guess after going to Atlanta, your choices are work out or cyanide. I’m not quite ready for the cyanide yet, I’m using nicotine.

I’m drawing ever closer to finding BB’s china pattern. Eve called me today to invite me to dinner. I couldn’t go, but she told me she had been doing some research online, but was having problems finding good close-up pictures of designs on the Internet. I directed her to eBay, and flipped over there to do a bit of research myself. The difficulty has been that BB’s china is from Wedgwood’s Wellesley design, and these dishes were put out with several different floral designs on the same plates during the early 40’s. I think I found it today. I emailed her a link to check, but hopes are high.

I decided on the desserts for the camp out today, sent in my registration, and put in for the time off that Monday. I'm having:

* a dark chocolate mocha-glazed pound cake (I'm doing a test run on that recipe with my new pan since I owe Donnie a pound cake anyway for not bringing one to Mrs. Ruby's wake)
* a carrot cake (I promised Gene of Bull Moose Paddles)
* a pan of pumpkin squares, for which I have an excellent recipe (that will fit in with a 'Fall Bounty' theme, and really these are loads better than pumpkin pie)
* a chocolate chess pie for the chocolate people
* an apple cobbler/brown betty thingy for the plain people (This was a big debate with myself. Usually I make a plain pound cake for them, but really wanted to do a chocolate pound cake this time. I'll just have to hope that apple is plain enough. I will get to play some with this one.)

I had packed all my stuff and an extra outfit so I could shower and leave for dinner from work. Tonight was Dave’s birthday party. I stopped off and picked up a suitably bitchy card on the way. We went to Della Ventura in Greer. It's the place we went to for Father's Day. Let me take a moment to rhapsodize about this place. Tucked onto a side street in Greer, it’s one of those restaurants that all the locals know about, but you kind of have to be in the local loop to hear about it. The food is amazing. They make their pizza and calzone crust from scratch every day. The pasta is delicious, the salads excellent. I tried the best blush Alfredo sauce I have ever tasted (or “pink sauce" in the local parlance, or tomato cream sauce for the uninitiated) – rich with tons of butter, flavorful with garlic, and with the perfect amount of tomatoes to give it zing without throwing off the balance. It was a symphony of flavors. Having attempted to make this sauce myself, I know how hard it is to get it right, much less perfect. I had a calzone tonight, because theirs are so excellent, stuffed with fillings and cheese, and with a crust that is the perfect balance between chewy and tender. After a salad though, they’re just too big to finish. That’s OK, I have dinner for tomorrow night. Yummmmmm.

The bears were there, and we all enjoyed each other’s company. Dave got a new tekkie gadget to play with, among other things, so he was happy. We did get one funny comment. A woman walked by and said “You don’t have a single woman with you!” We derived great amusement from that. I guess we need a token Goldilocks to go around with us, LOL.

I'm pissing Russ off about the desserts. First he wanted me to make the pumpkin pie bars in the shape of pumpkins, of course not thinking about the exponential difficulty of cutting, storing, and freezing shaped bars as opposed to square bars. So I vetoed that idea immediately. Next he wanted me to leave the raisins out of the carrot cake. I know he's allergic to raisins, but if the traditional recipe calls for that, I feel that I should put it in. It's not like he won't have four other desserts to choose from. But he's still ticked off about it. Sigh. There is just no pleasing everyone. I don't think he realizes that I spend a whole week baking before the camp out, all evening in the kitchen every night. It's just a lot of work. I have to concentrate on meeting expectations (which means that traditional recipes, like carrot cake, should taste the way people expect them to taste), having everything as fresh as possible (weighing what will freeze well and what will not, and which night to make them), and the way things taste. I don't have a lot of patience for exacting garnish at the best of times, but certainly not during the week before the camp out.

This reminds me of the sugar-free pie incident. The first year I did the desserts, he insisted on a sugar-free pie for he and Billy since they were on Weight Watchers. I initially said no, balking at adding another dessert to an already fairly ambitions line-up, and nervous about getting it all together and organized because I hadn't done it before. But I felt guilty later, and threw together a sugar-free pie anyway. Which he didn't even eat. There was one tiny piece of it eaten, and that was one piece that he and Billy split. They ate little bits of the other desserts, because they wanted to taste everything. You just can't feed hedonists diet desserts. So I learned that lesson.

Russ revealed tonight that he’s going on Chantix tomorrow to quit smoking. He went on another drug several years ago that made him so crazy Billy flushed it and told him if he took another one he would be single. So we’ll see how this goes. But I know at least one person that swore that Chantix worked miracles for him.

After dinner we visited, smoked, and talked in the parking lot for a while before peeling off to go home. It is a school night. But it was an excellent evening with great food and good company. And really you can’t ask for more than that.