Christmas dinner

What follows is an incoherent account of our Christmas dinner party:

This past weekend, I went to my parents' house to drop Lucy off (since we are going to New Orleans tomorrow) and to practice cooking a pork loin roast. It turned out pretty good at home, and I also spent the rest of the time Christmas baking and doing some last minute shopping with my mom.

When I got home Monday afternoon, we worked to get our house ready for the dinner on Tuesday. I went to HEB to find a pork loin roast, but they didn't have the kind that I had cooked in Corpus. I was really concerned. I ended up going to 3 different grocery stores. The HEB in Bryan had some organic pork loin roast but it was $7 a pound!!! I finally got two pork loin roasts at Albertson's but they didn't look quite the same as the one I had previously prepared....

We put the two leaves in the table and moved it into the living room (not in that order).

Our dinner was a fun time with friends. Including ourselves, we had 11 people around our table, with lots and lots of food and desserts. For dinner we had: pork loin; scalloped, cheesy potatoes (I used my food processor for the first time to slice all of the potatoes - it was great); salad; Andrea brought a side dish of delicious shrimp and vegetables; and Mariann brought a ton of leftover fajita fixings from work. AND believe it or not, people actually liked my pork loin. I think I was unduly nervous about it, because that afternoon, as I was preparing all the food, I actually got sick - it was weird.

Then we had a dessert table with a crock pot full of Keith's famous hot candy apple punch, lots of cookies, and some pumpkin spiced bread that I made in Corpus. We also had Bluebell peppermint icecream - yum. We played MadGab and Outburst before people left for the evening. Then, we spent an hour and half washing dishes and changing our makeshift dining room back into a living room. :)

We didn't really take any pictures - here's the only one with half of our guests: