Running Dinner¶
624 words on Food
We had our second Running Dinner this weekend. After the great success of the first one and everybody saying they wanted another, we were quite disappointed to not be able to draw more people than the last time. But it turned out to be just fine. Particularly as the majority of the participants were new and we didn’t know them before.
A wide range of different dishes was served. From steak, to salads. From strawberry crumble to Indian soup. Everybody made quite an effort. Particularly to ensure that nobody had to leave hungry. Most food was available in such generous quantities that you felt compelled to have more but had to keep in mind that there was another dish to come. Also, alcohol was served generously once more and to finish off one of the starters there was a water pipe as well.
This meant everybody was already reasonably ‘relaxed’ when arriving at our place for the party. Still, we had decided to offer cocktails to give people a warm welcome and a good start. This time we had Gin-Martinis. But very few people wanted those as we also offered Strawberry-Daiquiris. They’re made of 5cl of white Rum, 2 cl of Lemon Juice, 1cl of sugar (sirup) and generous amounts of ice and fresh strawberries (other berries will do nicely as well). To do that we had made a lot of ice beforehand (those ice ‘bags’ come handy if you need to make a lot of ice but its quite a pain to get the ice out of them, particularly if you’re needing lots of ice). To turn the ice and fruit into a nice, slightly airy liquid you need a bit of time and a powerful mixer…
… which meant I spent quite a lot of time preparing those cocktails. And as everybody liked them people came again and again, not giving me a break. To make things more funny, the mixer broke down half way through. So I had to revert to a smaller one. Luckily some guys where keen to quickly disassemble the mixer. And even more luckily the mixer is a 1980s piece of technology that I inherited from my grandma – quite ugly, but all that was broken was a fuse inside the machine. Don’t ask me why there are fuses at such places but there was even a spare fuse provided, meaning that I could use the machine again twenty minutes later.
We asked people to take photos at the meals they are having, so we can have a nice photo collection. To avoid the nuisance with all those different camera cables, I had borrowed one of those card readers which worked really well. Just one card couldn’t be used because it was in a different format (XF or so) and couldn’t even be inserted into the card reader. Once we had the photos, we stopped the films we were showing (Vanishing Point, Interstella 5555) in the party room and put on a slide show. People really liked that and the party really started afterwards, going on until six or so…
[The photo shows people watching photos of themselves. As the photo had to be done with a long exposure time because of the low light levels and thus wasn’t perfectly sharp, I tried to stylise that away. The filtering was provided by the ever wonderful GraphicConverter which was very quick to adopt CoreImage filters on X.4. CoreImage, on the other hand feels very slow on my machine. While I don’t have a fast graphics card, even pretty simple blur filters are much slower than they are in other applications.]
The Sunday was spent with recovering ourselves and the flat. Things are pretty much back to normal by now.
