All partied out....

It was the 1st birthday party for one of the nephews today. (We'll actually have another first birthday party in August). Fun, but it takes a lot out of you.

They actually had a really cool setup... http://www.luckylous.com/ did a "New York Style Hotdog Cart" thing. Hot dogs, burgers and fries right there, meant the bro in law & sis in law didn't have to do any of the cooking, and there guys even do the cleanup. Sweet! They also had a snow cone machine for the kids.... yeah... one of 'em was up to 7 snow cones by the time the snow cone machine departed. It was fun.

Rather uneventful for a party for that side of the family... lots of beer was consumed (and my sis in law made some pretty good sangria-type thing) but I think all the adults are finally a little too old for the old-school jackassery that they used to specialize in.

Oh yeah. Was going to bring an appetizer type-thing... found an online recipe for mini cheese calzones. Yeah. Lesson learned, the final product can only be as good as the sum of its parts. It was easy, and it sounded good enough to my post-work brain last week (and gimme a break, at the time I thought I needed something that would be OK to sit out in 90 degree weather)... store bought pizza whack-a-dough around string cheese. Was easy enough to do, but when I sampled one out of the oven and tasted it... just... ew. EW. Odd sweetness to the dough. Not good. I plated them up, still debating, and before we left I just decided to leave them. They'd probably be good with REAL pizza dough, but these were just nasty.

And, sadly, the recipe I used as a source was damned crappy and I now have two extra tubes of pizza dough in my fridge. Damnit.

But, felt better that when we got home, I started the prep for the tuna tartin from the Bouchon cookbook, so I can have it at work this week for lunch. Mixed the tuna and fixins, sans the herbs, which I just chopped, and have everything prepped so I can just grab the parts tomorrow and assemble at lunch time. But MAN... the tuna mixture already tastes good. Oil packed tuna really does make a huge difference. Coming out of the can.... it just even looked like tuna from when I was a kid. Actual chunks and not total mush.

Ok. Off to watch the Tivo'd Vegas Dream Dining special. Sigh.