dinner party

Just now was the annual my-father's-birthday-celebration-with-many-people-from-church-as-well-as-many-other-assorted-folks dinner at my house.

Thank God that the heavy rain from earlier in the day stopped come evening time, and my grandmother's filipino pork skewers (which Jan Ho is always raving about everytime i see him) that needed barbecuing outside the house could be barbecued properly (not by yours truly, of course, who would probably spark a salmonella or e. coli outbreak if left to do the grilling).

One problem is that my current house and the compound is rather a bit smaller than the old one at St. Paul's Church, and therefore it's rather a squeeze to fit in seventy or so people in, unlike last time, when i think a hundred or so could have easily fit in, with room to spare.

Anyway, i always look forward to the sheer amount of food that my mother and others prepare at these thingys. This year there was, among others, beef rendang, baked chicken drumsticks, swedish meatballs (with canned cranberry sauce, in lieu of the vastly more expensive lingonberry sauce at Ikea), a pumpkin and prawn dish (that, needless to say, i avoided like the plague), a tanghoon dish with more prawns (ditto), filipino pasta salad, and, of course, ayam buah keluak *slurps* And i haven't even started on the desserts yet...

I realise that whenever these things come around, however, i am almost never hungry, even with all the mouthwatering food around. Even today, i hardly ate, and that was like at ten thirty or so, after everyone had left, and my stomach didn't complain a bit (and for those who have heard my stomach growling before, well let's just say that there are animals in heat that would get aroused). Maybe it's a host-cannot-eat-while-people-are-still-around syndrome.

Well, i did take at least one thing out of the party, which is how to make coffee. I have admittedly never ever made coffee before in my life, so when a guest yesterday asked me for a cuppa i was like "ummm". So i had to go to my mother and ask her where's the coffee, how much coffee and sugar to put and stuff like that... Quite a learning experience, i must say. So when the next person asked i happily knew what to do. Talk about learning of lifeskills...

Bingo certainly learned something too, which is how to endear himself with the guests to cajole them into giving him their food. He was greedily making his rounds around all the tables, and emerged out of the whole night one bloated old dog. He even was so engrossed in gobbling up his mountain of food that he nearly got backed over by the car cos he didn't notice it... Never have i seen an eighty-four-year-old eat so much...