Italian night
One of the activities in The Club that I really enjoy being a part of is the Cooking Club. There are two MOMS Club chapters in our town & we've always had a combined chapter cooking club. The Other Side was responsible for organizing & hosting, but they could never get their act together. An event would be organized & either the day before (or in one case, a few hours before) they would cancel because everyone on their side flaked out. It was really irritating. After months of begging & nagging our co-presidents (one of them being photographer friend) to split & have our own Cooking Club, we finally did. Saturday night was the first "Our Side Only" Cooking Club & it went off without a hitch.

When the split was organized, we had 17 people sign up for the new Cooking Club. I was thrilled! Even if we had half of the attendance, it would still be successful. And that's exactly what happened - 8 people were able to attend this month. Our Cooking Club coordinator gave us the theme of Italian food for Saturday night & I got crackin' on my recipe search. At first I was going to make a tiramisu layer cake until I looked over the ingredients & saw that I would have to buy a whole lot of liquor. If I can't drink it, then I'm not buying it. So, I decided to go with a caprese salad. Sure, it was the easy way out, but it was light & refreshing & exactly what I was craving.

I got to the hosts house (which was beautiful!) & we lined up our dishes on her buffet table. There was prosciutto & cheese pinwheels in puff pastry, chicken florentine, pesto gnocchi, garden salad, meatballs, tortellini soup & brownies (I totally should have made desert). We a had a lot of fun eating, laughing & just enjoying the night out. Everyone was drinking wine (I had orange juice) & probably telling the group things they wouldn't have said otherwise - like how they weren't attracted to their husband, their plans for getting liposuction & bragging about discipline techniques (all of this actually came from one person). It was still a good night out, though.

The next event is scheduled in two weeks & I'm signed up to host in April. Hopefully we'll have the house by then (because that's a whole different post!)