Hadi's Birthday Dinner

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Like I've mentioned earlier, we decided to "save" a proper birthday cake for Hadi once our guests come. In fact, we actually went and held a proper dinner with the house people as well as some of Hadi's friends. Because it is now Christmas season, turkeys and capons were being sold at the butchers. So we thought it might be a rather neat idea to do a proper roast, hehe. Justin immediately started comparing our menu to the Christmas parties he has been to (although, as I pointed out, this isn't technically a Christmas party...) and was worried about what appetizers to serve instead.

Since I was already busy with the other food, I told him to just make whatever he wanted. But seriously! He only started to worry about it about 5 hours before our guests came! I told them to do some kind of finger food when we were planning this thing, but Hadi didn't want to do anything much, heh. In the end, Justin decided to make a salad, as well as roast potatoes. As for Hadi, well, he really helped me out with the cooking and cleaned up the house as well, hehe, so he wasn't totally jobless. So, here was our final "menu":

Appetizers:
Greek Salad
Roast Potatoes

Main Course:
Roast Capon with Honey
Macaroni and Cheese

Dessert:
Chocolate Cheesecake 1
Chocolate Cheesecake 2 (brought by our guests!)
Tang Yuan

There was a total of 9 people for the dinner, which pretty much maxed out the space available in our little house, hehe. I'll give you a brief overview of the food here, but do check out the recipes for them (if available) as there will be a more detailed "analysis", hehe.

I don't eat "rabbit food", so I didn't have a taste of the salad, but people seemed to like it a lot. I guess it wasn't too bad an effort from Justin, since it took him less than an hour to make it. We cheated and bought ready-to-bake roast potatoes, since Justin wanted to have potatoes with a crispy outing. I wouldn't say they were all that crispy, but they took shorter to cook than if we had used fresh potatoes, hehe, so that was fine.

I was a bit nervous about making the roast capon, since I haven't made whole roast chicken all that often. A few improvisations needed to be made to the basic recipe, but the end result was tender juicy chicken. Yummy~! As for the macaroni and cheese, I have no idea what happened, but the cheesy white sauce didn't turn out well. :( I can't understand that, since I can usually handle white sauce pretty well. It still turned out ok, but not up to standard, hehe. It tasted great, nice and cheesy, but somehow, the cheese and milk precipitated out of the sauce, so the resulting texture was a bit lumpy. So no recipe for that, but I will definitely try to make it again next time. ;)

And yes, you read that right. We had TWO chocolate cheesecakes, one made by me and one by one of our guests, who is apparently an avid baker. A coincidence that we both decided to make the same thing, but I suppose chocolate cheesecake would always be a hit anywhere, hehe. And I suppose its our fault for not informing our guests what Hadi's birthday cake was, but no one was too upset about it, hehe. In fact, the general reaction was..."TWO chocolate cheesecakes?!! Woohoo!" Ahahaha. Another one of the guests also made Tang Yuan, a warm Chinese dessert soup. He served this later on in the night, when it was getting a bit chilly, so everyone definitely appreciated it, hehe. It's a sweet soup with glutinous rice balls in it. The soup was spiced up with ginger and black pepper, while the rice balls lent their sweetness to the soup. They were filled with either sesame paste or peanut paste. Seemed like everyone enjoyed it, especially the rice balls, which were delectably soft, hehe. :)

In the end, there was definitely more than enough food, though there wasn't a huge excess, hehe. Looks like the amount was just right, which is nice. The desserts were more or less sucked up by all the people, while the chicken was scraped to the bone. There were small amounts of the appetizers left, but nothing too major. I'm pretty sure everyone enjoyed themselves, which is fantastic! :D And not just because of the food, hehe. Lots of fun and games and great people. What more could you want on a cold winter's night~? :)

Quote of the day: To remember a successful salad is generally to remember a successful dinner; at all events, the perfect dinner necessarily includes the perfect salad.