Monday, February 13th - our potluck was a resounding success!

It's a very cold and windy morning. The temperature is -20' but the wind chill is -30. We're heading for a high (?) of -13' with a wind chill of -23'. But all in all, we didn't fare too badly weather wise on the weekend.

What a great night we had on Friday! There were 6 of us but we had enough food to feed twice as many. Brenda arrived first with a lovely couple of bunches of tulips,(thank you Bernie)  and the others all came together shortly after. I had set up my dessert display which was a great success. The others provided everything else and what a feast it was.

We had mini quiche (all homemade, of course) and oysters - freshly shucked by the now experienced Lesa. We had a layered dish with  a cream cheese blend, spicy ground beef and numerous toppings. We had a very tasty dish with squares of baked biscuit dough topped with another cream cheese mixture and fresh chopped veggies. We had veggies, we had a hot, creamy dip and some great beverages to wash everything down.

We had a great time sitting around the table and nibbling and  chatting and nibbling and laughing and more nibbling. Finally we made tea and coffee and moved to the living room to have dessert. Because the desserts were all tiny, we were able to have as many as we wanted, guilt free.

We were very lucky that the weather cooperated. It was a clear night with clear dry roads. We were expecting some nastier weather on Saturday and Sunday so Mother Nature was totally on our side.

Our dessert buffet

I don't have photos of the food we ate in the kitchen but I do have a photo of the desserts and the whole gang (thanks to a delayed photo). For more detailed photos of the desserts visit http://atourislandtable.blogspot.com/ and click on the dessert display title.

Some of the Donagh cooking class alumni!

After such a great night Friday, it was off to work Saturday morning. It turned out to be a fairly busy morning so it went by fairly quickly. I stopped in to the Van Gaals for tea on my way home and we spent the rest of the afternoon tweaking the labels for the sunflowers seeds. As I worked, Brenda made supper and we finished at approximately the same time - a coincidence? I think not!

When I left their place at 9:00 it was snowing fairly heavily, although it was still quite mild and the road was quite slushy. By the time I got home it wasn't snowing at all. I washed up some dishes and put a few things away and I let the dog out around 11:00 and it still hadn't started snowing yet. My back patio was still totally bare. However when I got up in the morning it was very windy and had snowed after  freezing rain. The tree branches were all bent down to the ground under the weight of the ice and there were drifts around but I'm fairly certain we didn't receive near as much snow as was forecast.  So Sunday was a very quiet and relaxing day. Some laundry, a nap, and baking butter tarts for Bernie. A great way to spend a snowy winters day. Of course there was some shoveling and scraping of ice off the car windows in preparation for Monday morning but even that wasn't that big a deal.
Tomorrow I will post the recipes the girls prepared for our feast!