dinner at 11

All of you wonderful people who have homes and kitchens and front doors with real keys which you regularly use might not realize it, but goodness, staying in a home makes a difference.

A heck of a difference.

It's not that hotels don't have their charm. I certainly don't mind a good continental breakfast, especially if it holds the added lure of a waffle maker, one of the few things that might actually drag me out of bed during the part of day that is still classified as morning. But hotels can get old. The paper thin walls. The roommates that you hope don't snore. The maids that are constantly trying to barge in, though I realize that "barging in" is just part of their job description.

Anyway, this past week I have had the luxury of staying in a real, honest to goodness home here in Calgary. A friend's mom has been kind enough to open her house to a few of us, even offering us our own keys and bedrooms, respectively.

Wow.

So we had just a few people over for a real dinner last night.

John Legend was singing in the background and when he got tired Nickel Creek jumped right in; and all the while we were busy in the kitchen. My dear friend Ian, who is a master chef in his own right, had already prepared some spaghetti and delicious sauce the night before, and Emily had baked a cake while I had made some frosting. We also made sure we had everything we needed for salad, garlic bread, and of course, wine.

Well, I guess the only thing you need to make sure you have in order to have wine is wine--and actually, our guests supplied that.

But here we are. Stirring, icing, warming, buttering, pouring. Taking advantage of this beautiful kitchen, wearing no shoes and not thinking a thing about audiences or leotards or God I hope I get it.

It was dinner among friends.
With everyone chipping in.

And every beautiful cake needs a garnish, right?

So I might have taken a little spider from the halloween decorations currently gracing my dressing room.
He might have happily sat on top of our cake.

Our hummingbird cake.*

*no hummingbirds were harmed in the making of this cake.

And what a delicious three tiered beauty it turned out to be.
But more than anything else, the feeling of family, of community, was maybe the sweetest thing of the night.