Birthday Party, Chucks, and Fire...?

Oh, what to say about Angie’s birthday party, other than you should have been here...  

The background: Angie’s birthday was Thursday, and so I decided we needed to have a party. I asked her what she wanted to do for the big day, and she said drink wine. I said that could be arranged, and set off in typical Heather fashion to make it a good evening. I ran my idea past the other girls and then basically told Angie to show up to her birthday party. Haha. I wanted to make a delicious meal we could all enjoy (something much more difficult than you’d imagine, since we have a vegetarian and a lactose-  and gluten-intolerant member of the Pápa Americans) so I settled on a hearty veggie soup and baked apples. I got home from school and started picking up, decorating, and prepping food to cook later.

Maggie came over to help and brought another carrot and a white pepper, and so we sorta talked and putzed in the kitchen until Angie came over, which is when the wine was opened. We started the soup, Megan came over with extra dishes, and we sat down to dinner at 6:30.

Birthday dinner!

Virginia biked over right as we were finishing dinner, so she had a glass of wine and then I served dessert.

  We sang Happy Birthday, Angie blew out the candles and opened presents (there was a wine-theme.)

I found a triangle-shaped bottle

We all hung out and talked and had a ridiculous time until I started doing dishes, falling into bed close to 11. It was a great night.



Soup:
4 potatoes (small Hungary size, not big Idaho size), diced
2-3 large carrots, sliced
3 cloves of garlic, smashed and diced
a handful of green beans , cut in one-inch sections
1 can of red beans, rinsed
1 white pepper, chopped
3 veggie bouillon cubes

Served with toasted gluten-free pumpkin seed bread and margarine



Baked apples.. finom!



Baked apples:
5 assorted apples, hand-cored, filled with alternating layers of: cinnamon-sugar, instant oats, and honey. A cinnamon stick stuck in as a garnish.

It was actually quite delicious, if I say so myself.

So, the highlights of the evening:

 --teaching Angie how to pour wine without spilling
--conversations with a middle-aged woman about Sex and the City and STDs
--heated debates about whether or not my kitchen was bigger than everyone else’s, complete with a measuring tape
--conversations about various towns in Michigan where people grew up
--extensive ponderings about Flat (and Fat) Stanley
--Jedi-mind-tricking the birthday girl into blaming Megan for everything

--the insanely slow reactions to the fact that a napkin had caught fire on the table, Angie taking a picture of it, and me walking to the fridge to grab the bottled water to put it out



the napkin, on fire.



and the humdinger of them all... (drum roll, please)
--Maggie using a shoe (chucks, no less) to open a bottle of wine. Not because I didn't have a corkscrew, but because she'd seen it on YouTube.

 (I hope to post the video)

...as I was saying, this probably doesn’t sound all that funny, but you SHOULD have been here. We were dying of laughter. (and for the record, I had 2 glasses of wine. Which is a record in and of itself.)

So, I am taking down the streamers and other after-party cleaning. School today was fine, and I actually had something for lunch that I understood the menu for—spaghetti.
Tomorrow we are off to Budapest on the 6am train.
Have a great weekend!

UNCORKED video on Facebook