A Lovely Evening

We are pretty much homebodies.  I think it's because of our business, spending all our days with kids, talking to them, talking to the parents, always being "on".  When we are finished with work on or the weekend we love to be at home, just hanging out, just the two of us.    But when we were invited to dinner at a friends house (with another couple) we were excited and immediately accepted.  I guess it's because of the couples...they are great people.  We arrived at Kevin & Erica's lovely spanish style home at 4:30.  Their house is so beautiful, up in the hills, beautiful artwork and inviting pool.  The wine started immediately.  As you know Bruce and I are big French wine drinkers, K is a huge wine connoisseur of California wines, so it was a real treat.  Peter & Elizabeth our other friends arrived a bit after us.  They have 3 boys (6,8 and 10) so being exactly on-time just isn't in the cards.  Peter is probably the funniest man I have ever met, in my life.  He always makes me laugh.  We knew we were going to have a wonderful time.

Erica made this wonderful baked brie, it might not look pretty right now, but it was when it was first served...it was so rich and gooey and delicious.

The green olives were right in front of me, bad news...I ate so many.  I can never get enough green olives. 

It's so great when you have friends you are totally comfortable with.  We haven't know Kevin & Erica and Peter & Elizabeth for very long, we met them through our studio, their kids come to art classes and Bruce also teaches a "private" adult class and Erica and Elizabeth are both in the class.  In fact Erica was the one to "create" the class.  Like I said, we are homebodies and really don't do a lot of socializing, but, we always have a wonderful time and laugh a lot when we see Kevin & Erica and Peter & Elizabeth... we can't wait to do it again.

Elizabeth brought the salad and I brought dessert.  Of course I forgot to take a picture of it...but it was so rich, a double chocolate cake with ganache.  If you really love a dense chocolate cake, here is the recipe Double Chocolate Cake, it was pretty darn good.  Kevin did veal chops and roasted potatoes (on the grill), the roasted potatoes were super good, here's the recipe for them Grilled potatoes.  We also had many many glasses of excellent wine.  The night went too fast, the next thing we knew it was 11:00 pm.  Very late for us...we are usually in bed at 9:00 and asleep by 10:00 pm (and we don't have kids). 

We spent most of the evening outside by the pool.  We live by the ocean, so evenings are pretty cool (with the marine layer), so it's nice to be a bit more inland so that the evenings are really nice.  We had such a great time.  The hardest part was waking up Sunday morning at 7:00 am when our friend Steve called about our planned 40 mile bike ride.  We met him at 8:00 am, blurry eyed and tired.

Comments

[beki]

That sounds like a fabulous evening. Gosh, I'm in need of a night like that!

[swirldrops]

Good friends + good food = pure bliss!.. Add the chocolate cake and *yowzers* sounds like heaven!