Diary of a Metal Mommy

Is there anything better than sharing a good meal with friends?  Not much my friends, not much.  I’m very lucky to have friends in my life that are amazing cooks and are nice enough to share their talents with me!  Steph invited us over to her house to ‘break the fast’ for Yom Kipper…not that we were fasting, mind you, or necessarily really celebrating Yom Kippur…but any holiday is a good excuse to get together!!  As always it was amazing food and wonderful company.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.

Then my gourmet dinner group got together last Saturday at Nancy and Tim’s. Nancy always comes up with some fun group idea whether it be playing a game, doing pottery that she later fires in her kiln (how cool is that?!) or having a bake-off.  We arrived to be shown right to the kitchen and were told that it was girls against the guys, making a cake from scratch with no recipe to see who’s came out the best.  Well, let’s face it—I immediately thought us women had it in the bag.  Don’t get me wrong, our men are very capable in many ways—but they don’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen!  At least us ladies have baked a cake or two in our lives and could probably fudge it along a bit.  (no pun intended!) Grand Master Baker Rosemarie was not allowed to participate with us, and both groups were only allowed to ask her 2 questions.  Both cakes came out looking quite different—ours being a bit bumpy on the top, the guys’ looking extremely smooth, more like a torte.  (impressive!) We then proceeded to blindfold Greg and Dawn for a taste-test…Greg liked the women’s best and Dawn liked the men’s!  We all agreed that both of them were a bit dry, especially ours.  But ours had a little better flavor.  Then Nancy took them both, layered them together, slathered them with frosting and we gobbled them up.  Anything tastes good with frosting!  I wouldn’t say either group would have won any baking contests, but it was fun and I think we all did very well considering!!!

No big dinners tonight, but I will have company—the peeps are coming over for a podcast!!  Woo hoo, it has been WAY too long since our last show.  A lot of the reason for the delay is schedule—trying to get us all free on any given night can be tricky–and honestly a big part of it was also the fact that the last podcast we did ended up being a big ol’ hijunx.  For some reason we had technical difficulties and the whole show came out sounding garbled—you couldn’t understand a word.  What was really bad about that is that Stu the Wine Genius was with us as our guest that night for a wine-tasting podcast, and it was probably the first podcast in our two-or-so year history that we actually did a show that was about something.  There was definitely good information to be shared by Stu, and we had the most AMAZING wine–as you can imagine.  Alas, all we have now is the memory… Hopefully tonight will go off without a hitch!