Happy Halloween

I am way behind on the posting and don’t really have any time to write now, but I’m afraid you all will think I’ve abandoned the blog if I wait any longer.

This past weekend was party, party, party… We had a party on Friday night at our place for Rob’s birthday, and I think it went pretty well. I am always nervous when hosting a party or even having people over for dinner because I never know if its going to turn out well or if they will like the things I make. Plus, with Rob’s party we were mixing groups of friends—that is, the invitees were from different walks of our lives and didn’t all know each other. My experience with mixing groups of people who don’t know each other is that it doesn’t always go so well, but this time it ended up great and everyone was talking and in general having a good time. Plus, people seemed to like the things I fixed to eat, so that was a plus. The most popular food item was an apple dip I made; here, I’ll include the recipe (note, I don’t ever measure anything):

• Cream cheese (I used about 1/2 package of reduced fat)
• Brown sugar (maybe about 1/4 cup)
• Vanilla extract

I stirred it up and it was quite a hit, spread on granny smith or gala apples.

We had an Anth Halloween party on Saturday night that I technically was not invited to but I went anyway. Every year for the last 100 years Prof Pablo has had a Halloween party—complete with a pumpkin carving contest—but this year I had heard nothing about it, so I was actually getting quite worried that Pablo was sick or something. Then, come to find out, my name had been left off the email list and there was a party afterall. I was in a pinch to come up with a costume so I put on a safari hat, sewed some fake spiders to my field pants, and carried a data book—I went as a primatologist (with spiders crawling all over her). How original.

Sunday was followed up by another birthday party at for Rob at his parents’ house. More yummy things to eat, and of course, chocolate cake. Rob and I are about the point where we think we might need to go on a diet after all these parties. That will be difficult with a large quantity of leftover brownies sitting in our kitchen, plus a bowl full of Halloween candy for the trick-or-treaters.

Speaking of which, happy Halloween. Its never been my favorite, maybe because it’s the last day of October, which is my favorite month. I’ll just have to remember to go running early this afternoon so that I’m not running in to trick or treaters. Our neighbors told us that there are usually quite a lot of kids who come by, so hopefully we have enough candy.

Thanks for reading!