La grande bouffe

Ever seen the French film "La grande bouffe"? You know, the one where four gourmet food-loving men decide to lock themselves away in a countryside villa and eat themselves to death on amazing food? True, we are only two, but between birthday celebrations, Easter and time at home to cook together, we just about managed to do the same this weekend ...

It all started on Wednesday, with wine and a gourmet cheese fondue, homemade by Marcel's childhood sidekick and best friend now-turned cheese maker at Kaeserei Au bei Fischingen...

With the excuse of old-man birthdays, however, Thursday started to get serious with garlic prime rib, roasted dill green beans and garlic mashed potatoes, with wine. Never mind I haven't quite figured out how to say prime rib in French and the guy at the butcher's had no idea what I was talking about ... in fact, I don't think we actually had prime rib at all, but whatever the heck it was, it's worth making again and again and again and again ... and again.

Of course, we couldn't let Mom's timely import delivery of creme of tartar go to waste, so a birthday + springtime (read strawberries) seemed an appropriate excuse to attempt my first-ever angelfood cake from scratch. Unless you consider a denser-than-heck pound cake angelfood, however, this experiment was a terribly tragedy, a dishonor to the name "angel food". That said, the lack of angel-ness certainly hasn't stopped us from eating the entire thing ...

Friday, unexpected visions of Costco corndogs began dancing in my head. Seeing as I haven't had one in about five years, I guess they're allowed to make a demand for consumption from time to time. And so it was that we ambitiously tackled an online recipe for homemade corndogs... in front of unsuspecting dinner guests who had never heard of a corndog in their lives. In this case, probably a good thing ... flavour was not bad, but the dang dogs would have been entirely unrecognizable to an American.

This, of course, turned into an American cultural night with the further introduction of homemade snickerdoodles (again, thank you Mom/creme of tartar). "Snickers noodles?" "Nickers oodles?" ... "What do you mean 'snickerdoodle' doesn't mean anything?" (Is this really American culture??)

Saturday followed with cod with crispy potato crust and balsalmic sauce and green beans and sundried tomatoes and wine for lunch, and steak with whiskey and garlic marinade ... and wine. And Sunday with feasts of Easter baskets (read chocolate bunnies the size of cats, coloured eggs and jelly beans) and apricot-glazed smoked ham with the fixings ... and wine. (Feeling full yet?)

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, (before I begin my new-found diet), however, we also enjoyed a fabulous meal of lentil soup prepared with love and sent to us by my little-ist sis as part of her Operation Rice Bowl collections/Easter preparations with a note that read:

A part of dinner / We share with you / So that you can share / With others too.

All at one table / A family we are / The Rice Bowl family / Both near and far.

Today I ran/walked 19 kilometres; tomorrow the regular running schedule starts ... all the energy in this great food we've been blessed with has got be to good for something, right?