Weekend of awesome. :)
So, after my awful last couple of days of work last week, this weekend pretty much rocked.
Saturday - birthday dinner party at Mindy and Johnny's. I was going for low-key this year, given the two big parties on for May, and decided on a small group of friends and roasted animal parts. ;) The food was amazing and the company relaxing and comforting and all those good friend things. :)
Menu
Appetiser: Braised rabbit on a potato pancake with a mustard-rosemary-tarragon sauce, provided by dexfarkin. Beautifully cooked, professionally presented and amazing to eat. :)
Entree: Braised lamb with roasted vegetables (carrot, potato and brussel sprouts, whee!) and gravy by Mindy. The lamb was so tender you barely needed to chew and the vegetables were perfectly done.
Dessert: Frozen key lime pie, again by dexfarkin. I don't do the chocolatey type desserts, so my birthday 'cake' tends to be a pie. This one's my favourite, all limey and tangy and good, with a graham cracker crust. Also, I got a candle to blow out.
After food and wine, we headed up to the Griffin (of course). Johnny was actually playing a gig upstairs and kept popping down to say 'hi', and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. In the words of the roomie, imitating Gary Oldman on the Harry Potter set: "I've had rather a lot of gin."
Sunday was wet and rainy and blah. Perfect movie weather. :) The roomie and I headed out to see Thor, because we are big geeks and the roomie is honour-bound to watch anything Kenneth Branagh has been involved in.
Thor is, to be 100% honest, not the most in-depth material. The comic is a mythological boy's own adventure, with plenty of swashbuckling and godly battles and defeating monsters larger than life. However, the cast and crew of the film managed to take that and make a film that wasn't any kind of masterpiece of writing, but two and a bit hours of entertainment. A true 'popcorn movie', in the sense that it wasn't going to satisfy any intellectual need, but it was a great way to switch off for a while. I was particularly impressed by Chris Hemsworth, a relatively unknown Aussie actor who has very much Heath Ledger's grin and sense of fun (and looking at his IMDB page, he's in Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods, which is finally showing at Cannes this week, awesome). I'll be looking forward to seeing him in some other stuff. :)
Saturday - birthday dinner party at Mindy and Johnny's. I was going for low-key this year, given the two big parties on for May, and decided on a small group of friends and roasted animal parts. ;) The food was amazing and the company relaxing and comforting and all those good friend things. :)
Menu
Appetiser: Braised rabbit on a potato pancake with a mustard-rosemary-tarragon sauce, provided by dexfarkin. Beautifully cooked, professionally presented and amazing to eat. :)
Entree: Braised lamb with roasted vegetables (carrot, potato and brussel sprouts, whee!) and gravy by Mindy. The lamb was so tender you barely needed to chew and the vegetables were perfectly done.
Dessert: Frozen key lime pie, again by dexfarkin. I don't do the chocolatey type desserts, so my birthday 'cake' tends to be a pie. This one's my favourite, all limey and tangy and good, with a graham cracker crust. Also, I got a candle to blow out.
After food and wine, we headed up to the Griffin (of course). Johnny was actually playing a gig upstairs and kept popping down to say 'hi', and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. In the words of the roomie, imitating Gary Oldman on the Harry Potter set: "I've had rather a lot of gin."
Sunday was wet and rainy and blah. Perfect movie weather. :) The roomie and I headed out to see Thor, because we are big geeks and the roomie is honour-bound to watch anything Kenneth Branagh has been involved in.
Thor is, to be 100% honest, not the most in-depth material. The comic is a mythological boy's own adventure, with plenty of swashbuckling and godly battles and defeating monsters larger than life. However, the cast and crew of the film managed to take that and make a film that wasn't any kind of masterpiece of writing, but two and a bit hours of entertainment. A true 'popcorn movie', in the sense that it wasn't going to satisfy any intellectual need, but it was a great way to switch off for a while. I was particularly impressed by Chris Hemsworth, a relatively unknown Aussie actor who has very much Heath Ledger's grin and sense of fun (and looking at his IMDB page, he's in Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods, which is finally showing at Cannes this week, awesome). I'll be looking forward to seeing him in some other stuff. :)