Weekend Things--Taquisa

We had a little taco party Saturday night.

I had meant to have a party before I started grad school, to say goodbye to my friends before sequestering myself in the library for two years.

But I never quite got around to it, and two years had gone by. It was time.

Perhaps it was just an excuse to buy fresh flowers and use all of my Southwest-themed tablecloths and make Margaritas in the middle of winter.

In any case, it was great fun to cook up lots of delicious, spicy food.

Mexican food is really the only type of food I enjoy cooking.

Partly because I figured out long ago that if I wanted to eat good Mexican food in Maine, I'd have to cook it myself, and partly because I actually do make fairly decent Mexican food, whereas my Thai, Chinese, Indian, or African food is only so-so (and American food interests me not at all!).

Mostly, though, it's that I love to eat really good Mexican food. For the menu, I enlisted my boyfriend, Rick Bayless, and we cooked up: tomatillo chicken, potato and chorizo (both pork and vegetarian), spicy garlic portobello mushrooms, red tomato rice, Mexican pot beans. Plus cheese quesadillas (for the children and less adventurous types), fruit salad, and Mexican chocolate cake (with goat milk caramel sauce instead of frosting, because I ran out of energy and time before I made the frosting, and happened to have a jar of caramel sauce in the fridge).

M and our friend Kevin gave us a preview of their upcoming open mic performance (and this week's earworm) of The Eagles' "Take it Easy."

Z set up a Van Halen and Queen dance party in the basement.

Due to another Snowmageddon event, we didn't get quite as many guests as I had planned for.

But I'm not sure how many more people our house could have taken--plus we ran out of limes (but in a mid-winter miracle, we ended up the night with exactly as much tequila as we had started it with--I think it's a sign that we need to have another taquisa sooner than later).