Sunday Dinner at Nathan's... Jamie Oliver Chicken Galore!

I had a dream in which I remember nothing but lying on top of a guy friend of mine, and my sister somehow being disapproving of the way we chose to reduce space in a crowded ship. No idea what was up with that, so I'll continue with the update from yesterday instead. Oooh, Candy just left me a message about a "Christian rock / metal / alternative band" called Haste the Day. ("they kick ass and have a good message") Considering what happened when Elizabeth told me that Ministry and Tourniquet were Christian bands - Jon disagreed with her assessment and proved it, while she was insistent on her version of events - I think I'll take that under advisement, although Candy does seem to know more about music than Elizabeth and her brother James ever did! :P

After Teunis dropped me back off at church (thanks), I rang the doorbell. There was no answer, so I looked inside and rang it again. I concluded that there was nobody there, so I considered my options: busing home wouldn't be time-efficient, and I decided to bus to somewhere near Nathan's and call him to see what was up. After telling him that I was in a bind and wouldn't know where the #22 went (I hate getting lost!), he said that he'd pick me up at Tang's Noodle House. I settled down to read a LOT of urban legends, and after quite some time, I called him again: my brother had just arrived, so Nathan could leave since the chicken was cooking in the oven. I thanked him for the ride, and explained the circumstances to him: these things happen, and there's nothing you can really do about it!

When I got there, I used his house phone to call my dad to tell him what happened: it's courtesy and would save their worrying! (which is always a good thing to think about, Nathan agreed) He said he'd waited for me till 4... oh well, at least I was resourceful with my options! Then I went upstairs to see Jeremy cooking a bunch of Nathan's stuff in a wok, meet Nathan's friend Jessica (who knows Andrea), and talk to Jon about what had made me stranded. He suggested that I call Dad, which I told him I'd just done... he was sure they'd appreciate it, so I hope they did. Jon then asked about Teunis and Jasmine, so I told him about where she lived and his fuel issues / circumstances with the Sunday dinners (100 Mile House and moms?!). (I also said I'd let him know about her email address sometime... no real rush, since there is the Thanksgiving break!)

I then went downstairs to use the computer: his mouse was having serious issues, so I went back upstairs to see what was happening there. Nathan had a Jamie Oliver cookbook out: My Old Man's Superb Chicken and the Chicken Stuffed in Pastry were what we had. After a while, Eric and Christon decided to play NHL 2006 downstairs. Jon, Jeremy, and I followed them since Nathan and Jessica seemed to have things well in hand. (using a wine bottle as a rolling pin - wrapped in Saran Wrap - is cool inspiration, haha) Jon and Jeremy wanted to look up liquor store hours online, but they encountered the same problems I had. I went upstairs to ask Nathan what happened: his mouse was out of batteries, but he gave me two used AA batteries (for an hour of battery life) and advised us to use a coin to open the mouse. Jeremy opened the mouse and put the batteries in, and found some stores which were still open. Christon and Eric agreed to drive them to the wine store: white wine to celebrate Jeremy's birthday sounded good! We all agreed that Nathan should take after his dad in cooking: I remember the time Eunice and I went over before fireworks and found five dishes on the counter plus more food! When Nathan told us not to have dinner beforehand that day since his dad had cooked a lot of food, he meant it! (and his dad won't accept money from Isabel or her family for her living there... as the "third son," Jon would then owe Nate's dad a LOT of money for all the food HE eats when there!)

I didn't want to abandon Nathan and Jessica, so I stayed to chat with them while they prepared the stuffed chicken with lots of mushrooms. During that time, Jen arrived with news that Vivian and Karen would be late. The guys seemed to be taking a really long time, and Jessica had to leave soon afterwards to meet someone at UBC. When the guys finally got back with Grey Monk white wine and Golden Draak Belgian beer (dragons!), Christon said that the reason they'd taken so long was that the clerk insisted on telling everyone the life story of the wines they selected if they asked whether it was good! ("There was this lady who asked the clerk about it, and I told her that she shouldn't have asked that! Eric picked it since his parents have that a lot.")

Nathan hacked open the pastry coating on one of the chickens from the oven because Jessica had to leave, and marveled at how it seemed really good, albeit a bit dry. We weren't supposed to eat the pastry coating (it was all oily and such), but as I told Jeremy later, the only reason Jen and I had some on our plates was that we wanted to try some even though the recipe said not to eat it! Jon decided that the two hunks of pastry coating would make good non-wearable crowns for the birthday guys, so he made Jeremy and Christon pose with them for a picture.

Someone brought up a case of bottled water from the basement, and we drank it all during the meal. Eric asked whether Nathan had any wine glasses... after looking in the cupboard, he asked whether Nathan had any NON-Saran Wrapped ones! Not really... they DO use them, but always put them back in the wrap. Someone else made a remark about how Nathan DID remember to walk people to the door as a good host... he didn't remember napkins or other little things until someone asked about them! Jeremy said that at least Nathan was doing better than he'd been when he hosted the first dinner, since there was a table with a tablecloth and chairs! Christon said that those were things that Nathan already HAD, but I guess hosting does have a learning curve!

Jon filmed Nathan hacking at the baked pastry flour, and then made a joke about food p*rn: "Nathan can't view p*rnography, so this is how he looks at it. You see, the chicken has a lemon up its butt..." Everyone laughed and was suitably horrified. He also supplied us with the real name for food p*rn: gastrop*rn, which he got from reading stuff on the Internet. When the time came to hack open the OTHER chicken, the gravy had leaked from the pastry, so that was a bit drier than the other one. We had fun making up names for it: Save-On Chicken, Reject Child, the Virtuous Daughter, Safeway Chicken, Buy-Low Chicken, etc. (the good stuff was Swiss Chalet / Red Robin's Chicken) Jen said that the new Justin Timberlake song SEXY BACK annoyed her, and after listening to some of it on the Beat, I agreed with her! (not that I had a high opinion of him anyhow...) Jeremy took a call from his grandparents, and returned to find us all laughing at some other joke Jon had made about the food... hey, if Vancouver can publish a guide for dumpster divers, this stuff would be a prospect for it if we didn't eat it all ourselves! (we also talked about how grocery stores sell rotten veggies for a buck, and regularly throw away perfectly good food in their dumpsters)

When Jen announced that she had to leave early because she was meeting a friend at 9, Eric insisted on driving her home, and Christon wondered why someone used finger quotation marks around the word "friend." Jon then asked her, "What decade was your friend born in again?" to general merriment and laughter from everyone else. (it's a joke because the last guy she liked was 37 years old and had two kids... 12 years older than she is!) Jen didn't hear him and asked him to repeat himself, then figured that she was better off not knowing: good call! He made a crack about the 60s still being a good decade, so Jeremy turned to me: "Being born in the 70s doesn't make you THAT old, right Leslie?" Haha, you are SO right! Yeah, I'm sure Jon makes fun of Jen's "older men" thing, but they get along well... if they didn't, he'd be worried! We remarked on Karen's red face, and Jon not wanting anyone to see how red he got. Then Jeremy told us that he got really hot after he finished eating, and really cold before he ate stuff: it's that metabolism! (at least he's not emaciated because then people wouldn't really find that attractive, as Jon joked)

We had homebrew (batch 1 and 2), the Belgian beer (it was malty, the guys said), and the Gewürztraminer white wine (lychee?!) which was really sweet and had no aftertaste. (Jeremy said that his basement might be cold enough to make some other beer after Thanksgiving, and he'd brew it in his room with the thermostat if it wasn't... food thermometers probably won't work with beer, despite Jon's joking about it) Dylan called Vivian and said that he'd arrive soon, so we had fun with the "Dil-Dil" thing for a while before he got there. (Steph called him that last week, and he was NOT impressed ["Number One: Do NOT call me Dil-Dil!"]... Jeremy just always thinks of another certain thing that SOUNDS like "Dil-Dil" whenever he hears it, heh) Jeremy told me that he keeps all his cards in a filing cabinet: now he's given me inspiration! Maybe I can find a huge storage box at the store today... the only thing is that I'll have to peel off my greeting cards from construction paper. Too bad that I thought my mom's way of doing stuff with our old baby cards was the best thing ever six years ago! (most of the cards will have construction paper still on the back... but what counts is that I'm keeping most of those cards, right?!)

Once Dylan arrived, he ate the leftover Reject Chicken (which Nathan was going to give to me since his fridge was full) and a bowl of not-too-old cereal. Jon commented that some of the cereal boxes on top of the fridge were really old because of the X-Box promos / 10 Free Books promos... besides, he recognized them from before he went to Toronto! Nathan told us that he'd poured himself some cereal once, and noticed these mini black spots in the cereal... then he noticed similar ones on the counter. He then realized they were dead bugs... EWWWW! That inspired Jeremy to tell a story about how his family had had broccoli / meat / potatoes for dinner once years ago: they'd noticed WORMS in the broccoli after it had been cooked! I don't think anyone continued with THAT meal afterwards!

We discussed hummus, chickpeas, Tim Horton's (we don't want to know how many times Christon went there in Edmonton!), a city works inspector letting Christon sleep on the job since he worked hard 12-hour days, Christon's family growing only tomatoes now (other veggies have too many bugs around), and the band MOTHER. (Jeremy likes them and bought a CD) "Fat kid" song, a song that was inspired by hip-hop, "we hope you liked our home recording," five people crowding around a mike to record stuff... it all sounded pretty good! Then Nathan changed the music on his laptop: no, this was NOT a pretty diverse record, haha! Eric took over the laptop to look over his picks in the hockey draft for their pool, and soon half the people there were discussing hockey. Dylan said that there should be a hockey-free zone, so I commented that Danielle would really love that... Nathan definitely agreed! I told Jeremy that he should get used to this for the next nine or ten months, especially since Steph wants to defend her #1 status from last year.

He asked me how this whole thing started: I thought he meant the church pool, so I told him that it started last year. Then he clarified that he meant hockey pools as a cultural thing since they weren't really in existence ten years ago: well, I have no idea on that! Christon mentioned that nobody was paying attention in Sunday School because Sam and Chris had printed out a whole list of names and were ANALYZING everyone's picks of earlier in the morning! (and mentioned that Phil had accidentally picked Roberto Luongo first overall, and that Eric wanted to go to sleep at 7:30 because he'd slept at 2 and his mom had woken him up at 6:30 by asking whether he wanted to be up at that time... nobody would let him do so!)

Eric told me later that they'd chatted using the hockey site's chat software, and that he was the latest one up in his house on every day except Sundays) Jon remarked that this year's pool was officially less than 15 hours old, and they were already wanting to trade players since people didn't get who they wanted in the morning... too true. He attempted to change the subject by talking about football: nobody really bit since the guys were almost lying down for naps at the time! (I told Dylan about the word "soporific" and about tryptophan in turkey... NOT chicken!)

After some time, I noticed that the hockey site reminded me of LJ's XColibur layout. Then I went up to Eric and asked what was wrong with my MSN name: he thought it was gross that I wanted people to touch my skin. Uh, not literally! (Jen and I disagree with him that it's gross, so there!) Dylan had been sailing and playing volleyball earlier, so he talked to Jeremy about that. He mentioned that he'd seen Janette volunteering at the beach for a free T-shirt, and that sparked a discussion about freebies and mugs. Someone figured that mugs only cost like a cent to produce, so it was no wonder people gave the credit card merchants fake addresses and they didn't care! Later, Jon wanted to go to Dragon Ball, so a bunch of us went after paying for the meal. Just before we left, Karen thought that Isabel (her cousin) was home, so we all stopped by her room to chat briefly. Jeremy and I had to tell Dylan that Isabel lived there because it was easier to get to school that way! She told us that Joey was scared of roller coasters, and wouldn't get on one: Christon said that they'd tried to get him on one at Six Flags, and he would NOT go with them!

We met up with Anthony at Dragon Ball, and saw Connie there with a couple of other people. After ordering various flavors (I was the lone holdout), we talked about our friends' personal lives and jokes. (puppy love, not seeing people anymore, talking about serious stuff, boyfriends / girlfriends who were controlling...) Eric thought that he could make me his slave because I picked up his bubble tea cup, and that it was flavored like chicken / dog / dragon because of the animals on the lid / cup... I don't think so! He had pineapple with no sugar, so it definitely tasted sour! Jon had blueberry and Chinese pear with pearls and coconut jelly. After we were on our way home, I mentioned that I'd get no sleep if I were blogging all night, so Eric tried convincing me to just wait. Well, I dunno... but I was thinking of splitting this day update into two parts anyhow. Darn the mouse issues at Nathan's! :P I was kinda hyper on the way home, but that's par for the course: Eric thought that alcohol made me even crazier, and that's entirely possible! (Jon and Jeremy had the most, while Jen and I probably had about the same!)