Happy New Year!

What a wonderful way to usher in the new year. We had the usual suspects over for a small get-together. Dave made chicken wings, I made a "vile punch", which has been renamed "magic juice" by Denise.

For the wing recipe, see Dave's sister's blog at Madison House Chef.

The punch was easy to make, I combined kiwi strawberry juice with raspberry sparkling water, vodka and Chambourd. That didn't quite give me the sparkle I wanted, so we added 7-up and more vodka. I finished it off with a frozen punch ring made in a bundt pan with tangerine rings and lemon juice. If I'm going to get loaded, it's going to be a healthy blend of booze and vitamin C.

Not known for my baking/pasteries, it's kind of an ego boost that I get raves for my soups, main dishes and now punch. So allow me to bedazzle you with a roast and bring the cookies.

Denise brought the game "Apples to Apples" and we gathered around the dining room table to play. For those who don't know the game, you are dealt a number of red cards. You take turns choosing a green card. You select a red card that most closely defines the green card that was chosen, say Jerry Seinfeld for "witty". But you have to keep in mind who your audience is, I'm a sucker for flattery of my hair for one, and inside jokes may lead to some surprising choices. I was terrible at the game at first, but then gained steam as I caught on. We played to the end of the deck, and I won!

We toasted the new year with a bottle of Italian sparkling that I had never had before, and shot off some fireworks to cheers from the neighbors.

We went to bed with the kitchen a horrific mess, but it was an easy cleanup the next morning.

In keeping with our new years' tradition, we took a little road trip to the Saigon Market to try something new. I bought a bottle of lychee soda, with a very cool bottle: the stopper was a clear blue glass marble that had to be pushed out of the way to allow the gas to escape. Verdict? Cool and refreshing! I also picked up peach sugar wafers, canned lychees (they look like white cherries), canned spiced crab meat (already mixed with corn meal to make asian johnnycakes), a pommelo (asian grapefruit), and seasme seed candy. One thing on the ick list was a bottle of salted lemonade with manadrin: didn't need the salt, and way to syrupy. Feeling bold, but not quite bold enough to try any of the salted, dried or frozen fish there yet.

We also went to Marge's Donut Den (yum!) and Pete's Gourmet Market (closed). Ended the day with three movies: The Time Traveler's Wife, Superbad and Avatar. TTW was kind of a frenetic mess, the pacing was too confusing to embrace the story and frankly, adult time traveler hanging with the child-wife was just a no, why not send the child version of himself? Superbad, we started watching on FX, but decided the previous viewing was enough and decided to watch Avatar instead.

Hm. Visually, Avatar is amazing, the computer animated sequences believable. The first quarter of the movie was interesting storytelling. But the movie started to strike me as something I've seen before. It was like someone took all the best hooks from epic movies and tried to make one movie out of them. And the storyline was, well, a mishmash of genres: a sci-fi love story set in the future based on prehistoric principles of living as one with nature with a cautionary tale of corporate greed destroying nature. What about religion - got that too! As for obvious ripoffs or "homages," I give you Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Pinochio (or any number of Disney movies), the list goes on. Once we started playing the "hey, wasn't that just like Yoda and Luke in Star Wars?" the film lost its luster.

Overall, a delightful weekend with plenty of resolutions already in place and the formation of more to come. But that is for another post.