A Midspring Night's Feast

I love my neighbourhood. More specifically, I love my neighbours. They host these really great dinner parties and we all pig out and I usually get booze (or yummy sparkling fake booze).

On one Saturday afternoon in late May, we finally had one of the dinner parties that I’d missed so desperately during the school year. With my hair freshly dyed, wearing a new outfit, and with ambitions of a super-duper food blog rattling inside my skull, I set forth to make a pasta salad unlike any other pasta salad seen before by mankind (actually, that’s a lie; I was trying to copy the fantabulous pasta salad my aunt Debbie made for us the previous summer). So I spent a late morning/early afternoon chopping veggies, cooking pasta, stirring in fried onions and pesto, chopping fresh herbs, and finally placing my masterpiece in the fridge so the flavours could mature. Several hours later, I was rewarded with a pasta salad that smelled fantastic, but was practically flavourless. I was quite dismayed at this, but thought, “What the hey, it looks pretty and the veggies taste good”. I would have put in more pesto but the salad was already drowning in it. So I brought it over anyway.

My mom, being surprisingly supportive of my food blogging efforts (even though it was another thing to help me spend time on the computer), took loads of pictures. She even got artsy (see picture of biscotti dough in her Kitchenaid) and insisted on getting pictures of me actually cooking. There’s one she took of me looking over my shoulder, which she calls “The Sexy Chef”. I took pictures of her hands rolling biscotti dough.

Mom made some lovely cookies for the party as well. Not only did she try out a new recipe for almond biscotti that I think we found on the internet, she made double-chocolate cookies with marshmallows in them. I think she's really Martha Stewart in hiding...

Music for this post: "Come on! Feel the Illinoise!" by Sufjan Stevens

Oh, so painfully artsy! Mom took this. I take it as evidence that my love for all things artsy is genetic and totally not my fault.

"The Sexy Chef" redux, courtesy my sweet self. That dough smelled fantastic...

I know it's hard to tell, but mumsy used multicoloured marshmallows. There are very few things in this world more satisfying in this world than chocolate and rainbows mixed together.

This is why you do not leave cookies unattended in my house... kidding, kidding! This is my attempt at being artsy, before I started chewing on the smaller one.

This was Mom's idea. I took photos of the salad with vines of ripe red tomatoes, but the contrast here is much better. You win, Mom.