we survived the birfday dinner

Whew, what a weekend.

We spent all day Saturday shopping for and cooking wonderful-smelling things (see this post for a hint) including a return to an old favorite, pineapple upside-down cake. Then we put all the perishables into big ol’ bowls and parked them outside on our dwarf balcony (I guess it’s good for something after all, for part of the year at least) until Sunday.

Sunday was a whirlwind of clean-up and prep actitivity. We’d never done dinner for seven (Natasha, Tommy, Michael, Tammy, Matthias, and us) before, so we had to figure out the logistics of the Cobaugh dinner table within the space of our dining room. It worked out OK, I guess, but I think that seven diners is a stretch. We really need a bigger table if we’re going to do dinner for seven again. Six would be OK though.

To top it off, for the first time ever, we had a reasonable place for our guests to hang their coats and hats and scarves and gloves and stuff:

our magical coat hook

Sarah and I bought that rack of hooks over a year ago and then never installed it. So we took 15 minutes on Sunday afternoon and just did it. We really should have done that a long time ago.

I think Sarah and I were really we impressed that we pulled off the whole meal:

  1. salad
  2. garlic bread
  3. pasta and the sauce
  4. several kinds of red wine (thanks to Tommy and Natasha for bringing a bottle along)
  5. pineapple upside-down cake
  6. [*Eiswein*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_wine “What’s that?”) (from Aldi)
  7. coffee (French-pressed espresso beans and 12% fat coffee cream make for unusually rich coffee)

It was a ton of work, but it was very satisfying at the end of it all. Maybe there’s hope for us yet. ;-)