Surprise Wine Tasting Party!

It's been nearly 2 weeks since this happened but I've been a very bad tardy blogger.

In brief, I had Friday 30th October in my various calendars (Joe and I are very sad and geeky, we sync our calendars - though this is more useful than it is geeky as we both have busy lives!!) down as being: "Joe and Tara out for dinner somewhere..." location: "surprise, not telling"

cool!

I've been whinging hinting at Joe for ages to plan something nice as it's always usually me who organises our fun nights (theatre, live gig, dinner etc) out. He'd obviously taken the hint and planned somewhere nice for us to eat. I wasn't at all unhappy at this prospect given the fact that the place he took us on our anniversary was recently voted as one of the top 10 places to eat steak - in the UK!

Anyhoo, so I arrive home (late!) with a face full of makeup and thinking I'd apologise for my timekeeping and dash upstairs to change into something glam and then leg it to whatever restaurant he'd booked us into.

INSTEAD I got the shock of my life when I discovered our living room was full of girls (oh yes, Joe planned this *really* well ;-) ).

Bless him though, he'd been secretly scheming with some friends of mine for months and had organised this evening for me. It was such a lovely thing to do, I was really touched! Especially as one of my friend's I'd seen the day before and was a bit puzzled as to why she wasn't going to Ireland with her hubby on the same day as he was but didn't think too much of it... but it was because she'd agreed to come to this! I have some really lovely friends :-)

So anyway, without further ado, (yes I know I used that expression in my last post, never claimed to be original though eh? haha) here are some pics from the evening.

First we started on the white...



ooh, what's under bottle B..?!



We had four 6 bottles of lovely whites to try in our 'guess the most expensive' and 'oldest' etc quiz!

Then we all stuffed our faces with the most delicious spag bol made by my beloved.

Then it was onto the reds, yum!

There were a few techniques employed to cope with the overfull glasses when moving from one bottle to the next...



Although some were able to combat this dilemma by keeping several glasses on the go at once... ;-)



And here's some pictures of some of the lovely ladies that were there to make my surprise night even more special :-)






Now, does the girl on the right in the pic above look like she's plotting something hmmm?

Well she was... Halloween Cupcakes!!

Look at these beauties



Nom nom nommmm

absolutely lush!!



What me?! Eat TWO cupcakes?! Never, I don't *do* refined carbs...



Okay, who am I trying to kid - busted!!



Amazingly, 3 cupcakes managed to survive to see another day! (before being demolished by me, Joe and my son!)



And here's me and my surprise party planner extraordinaire of a boyfriend... bit sozzled... okay a LOT sozzled (check out the red wine lips - classy!) but very happy and chillaxed...



Blue Steel??



Maybe not... :-D

Yes, we ran out of glasses. Yes, we had to borrow some from next door. No, that still wasn't enough so yes we used disposable champagne flutes (they hold a surprisingly large amount!)



And that's your lot :-)

We didn't finish all the wine (gave it our best shot mind!) so I froze some white wine into cubes and used in the delicious chicken, veg and white wine creamy pie with sliced potato and cheese on top that I cooked for my Mum and Joe's parents when they came round for Sunday Lunch:



Delish!

Although please note that this wasn't the healthiest of meals (despite being made with chicken breasts, plenty of veg and half fat crème fraiche) due to the enormous amount of cheese that went on the top. Bloody lovely though and on days when I have biiiiiiig meals like this I tend to eat that and very little else - so it all balances out nicely :-)

TJx