On Sunday afternoon, Candice and I hosted a fun little gathering over at Heckel Manor. It was a combination of affairs all rolled in to one.
One of our friends Amiri is starting a catering company with two friends he met in culinary school. The outfit is cleverly named Tastebudds. Candice volunteered me to design, develop, and launch their website (which I am happy to do anyway, I enjoy my fun web projects - see forwardtheater.com but please excuse the current issues with Twitter's API...grumble).
On an almost completely unrelated note, Candice also participates in a book club; and when I use the terms "participate" and “club,” I mean there are four people and they meet once annually. In a good year. Amiri happens to be one of the four "participants" of said “club.” So for shits and grins, they decided to parlay the following:
- A trial run in-home catering event for Tastebudds serving
- brunch for a poorly organized, weakly disciplined book club with the added benefit of
- introducing Can and Danny, the other two partners in Tastebudds as well as
- rewarding me for my volunteer web work with some delectable cuisine of which I would
- take photos to eventually be showcased on tastebuddscatering.com
Got it? Me neither.
Folks started showing up around 11am and drinks were served. Julius Meinl coffee for the weak, and Candice's locally famous Bloody Marys for the strong. Shortly thereafter a whirlwind of culinary excellence came to fruition in our kitchen and a variety of scrumptious treats came out. Deconstructed BLTs (minus the B for the veg-heads), shrimp cocktail, herbed breakfast potato egg scramble, home style grits, and an assortment of desserts. Off the chart tastiness. After dessert, the book clubbers began their discussion on Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray", and the rest of us sloughed off to the living room to watch the Illini hoops team get run out of their own gym by the Badgers (causing me to utter the phrase “I should have gone to Wisconsin” for the second time this young year). After the hardwood beatdown, the boys plated three different dishes and I went bananas with super macro mode on the ill-equipped Canon S5 IS.
It all made for a wonderfully unique Sunday experience. You can find the photographic evidence here on my Flickr page.
