Sounds like a weird combination? It sure is. Yes, in this blog post I will be writing about cooking and food… and aquarium fish. Weird.

This past weekend we hosted a dinner party for our friends Liv and Rob, who we always have a fantastic time with. We decided to make a three-course meal, but didn’t try anything new since we were under some time constraints for cooking.

It’s strange, I’ve gone from being a cocktail-only person, to being a maybe-sometimes-champagne person, to appreciating both wine and champagne now. I guess I have my friend Crista to blame for that! We had quite the array of drinks on Saturday, and I was surprised the next morning to see how much we had really consumed.

I prepared the tiramisu the night before, but everything else we cooked fresh the day of. It wasn’t quite dinner theatre… we were scrambling around the kitchen in front of our guests. But I think overall it was a success!

For the appetizer we had a roasted creamy butternut squash soup with fresh cream, shaved parmigiano reggiano, chopped chives, and freshly grated nutmeg. Click here for my butternut squash soup recipe.

For the main we had beef shortrib braised in Barolo red wine, served over a bed of fresh pappardelle pasta noodles with pine nuts, spinach, chanterelle mushrooms, and parmigiano reggiano cream sauce. Click here for my braised beef short rib and pappardelle recipe.

For our sweet finish, we had my cheesecake tiramisu with strawberries and espresso wafers. The tiramisu had lady fingers soaked in Kahlua, coffee, coffee liqueur, and chocolate liqueur. Click here for my cheesecake tiramisu recipe.

The dinner party was probably a little too fun.

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On a completely other note, we bought some new discus for our aquarium! I am really as I have always wanted more discus in the tank and finally was able to convince Allan over the past year or so to be open to more discus.

We bought four new discus fish, for a total of five now in our tank. We got a Golden Master, Red Melon, Red Turquoise, and Tiger Snake Skin to add to our Red Dragon (the larger one we’ve had for almost a year now). I absolutely love them! Now we have to name them…

What did you get up to over the weekend?