This past weekend Jennifer and I enjoyed our bi-monthly supper club with Raigan, Eric, Joy and Stev, with Margaret hosting. Margaret prepared a most-excellent Chef Paul Prudhomme beef bourguignon. Her support call went out for crusty bread, some sort of green salad thingy, and desert. Raigan prepared an awesome green salad with apples, walnuts, and a raspberry(?) vinaigrette. And just because she is a suck-up keener, she also made a jammy appetizer that was enjoyed with crackers. Joy made a chocolate chocolaty chocolate cake with chocolate chocolaty chocolate icing. The best thing about Joy’s cake is that Margaret was just rude enough to not offer us coffee before inviting us to leave. If she had, I would have been compelled to have a second slice of cake which would have without a doubt propelled me into cardiac arrest. Thanks for looking out for my best interest, Margaret!

For my part I provided a couple of loaves of crusty bread. It should be noted that I really enjoy baking, as unlike cooking it is very scientific. In this sense baking reminds me high school chemistry lab – if you veer from the instructions by even an iota, you will most likely get a inedible mess. Occasionally however you will do even worse, like the time in tenth grade when the school was evacuated because we made hydrochloric acid by (sort of) accident. Even more rarely, there is a truly serendipitous moment when you make something entirely new, AND it is edible, AND it won’t kill you. I have only read about these baking moments. Anyway, I did not aim for this rarefied moment of baking, but I did want to try out something that required a couple of days of carefully orchestrated agents, reagents, actions, and reactions to perhaps engender any modicum of success. So I took the weekend and made a some half-whole-wheat rustic bread. From everything that I read about one’s first attempt at baking, I was steeled for abject failure. Surprisingly, my first foray into bread baking from scratch was instead just successful enough as to leave me most likely thoroughly disappointed with my next attempt. We will see soon enough.

After dinner, Margaret, Raigan and Eric introduced the rest of us to a fun card game called “Oh, Hell” “Aw, Shit” “Tarter Sauce” in which you get points by not winning any points, lose points by not winning enough points, and the dinner hostess gets points each round just by virtue of being score keeper. It was an all around nice close to a fun weekend. Like always, click the thumbnail above to see the pics.