The cooking party

Autumn and I have a very simple motto: 

we only have one life so we must make the most of every eating and food-related opportunity as possible. 

We've introduced Joanna to this motto over the last few years and she's become a full convert. It's sort of an unwritten rule that you have to like food to hang around with us. As a group, we decided that last Friday would be the perfect time to have a cooking/20th birthday party sleepover for Autumn. After many, many texts sent between our three phones, the plans were finalized. Autumn would pick me up at home before going to the grocery store and Joanna would meet us when we got back. Autumn was very flustered when she finally came to get me because she "almost died three times THREE TIMES on the way over!!" Apparently, she had a one-sided conversation with the individual driving the other car that included phrases such as "CHILD, you should NOT be driving! Don't you know you can't cut RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME WHEN I'M TRYING TO DRIVE? You almost made me DIE!!" She was still so worked up it that when we drove by the scene of the almost-crime, she slowed down to show me. Unfortunately she slowed down a little too much thereby causing the number of near-death experiences to reach FOUR, but obviously we survived.

We finally made it to good ol' Stop & Shop and walked five aisles before remembering that the whole purpose of the trip was to buy necessary items, not wander aimlessly up and down talking. Being the birthday girl, Autumn was told to pick a snack for us to eat while we made supper. 

There were about 57 too many types of chips for someone in Autumn's current state of mind to choose from.

{not pictured but very vital to the event- butter and chocolate cupcakes}

After making our purchases, we returned home without incident and began the process of cooking baked macaroni and cheese with bacon. It's really much more accurate to say that we began the beginning of the process because we didn't eat until over two hours later. Part of the delay was due to the fact that we didn't have the 4 cups of milk required for the recipe. I believe we had a whopping 1/3 cup. Thankfully Grandma's Grocery was open next door so we didn't have to make another trek to S & S. 

Joanna was in charge of the cheese...

...and Autumn headed up the bacon frying department. She loved her job.

I was in charge of photography, finding various dishes and pans, and dropping half the bacon on the floor. I just bring chaos with me where ever I go.

By quarter of ten our meal was prepared, the kitchen was cleaned up{mostly}, and we headed down to our party room. We had set up a little birthday table in honor of the very special birthday girl. The cookies on the right say 'happy birthday Autumn' set-up like Scrabble letters on the Scrabble board. 

{That's Earl the Fish in the background.}

This is what we did for the next three house: eat, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat, talk, talk, talk a little more, eat some more, talk, talk, and talk. Then we ate and talked a little more just because we could. That was, after all, the point of the party. Next on the agenda was movie time. Once again, the birthday girl had to pick the movie which lead to more overly-polite conversations. ''Oh no, you pick what we watch.'' ''But I don't want to pick!" "But it's your birthday." "But you guys have to watch the movie too." "But we like all these movies." "We're getting old here, ladies." Finally we settled on 27 Dresses, but we could have chosen How the Grass Grows because the other two were asleep 15 minutes into it so I basically watched the by movie myself. 

The next morning we woke up fashionably late, ate breakfast, divided up the remainder of the fabulous bacon-filled macaroni and cheese and said our farewells. Overall, it was an extremely successful cooking/birthday party.  The only downfall of the weekend was that we completely forgot to make our super buttery popcorn like we always do. That, however, is a problem that will be remedied asap at our next cooking party. It's just about guaranteed the ingredients of the next party will also be butter, bacon, cheese, and popcorn because we don't like to stray from the tried and true.