Let's Paarrty!! Part Two, Friday Dinner

After Dave's party, I wasted no time. I went straight home, packed up the remaining family members and headed off to Ray's for our annual hotpot party. I even changed my shirt so I won't look the same in all the pictures (smart huh?) If you look carefully at the photo you'll notice my boys are missing. Oh yes, another worry-free party for me!

An annual tradition for my boys is to spend four days at my sister's house in Los Altos, sorta like a winter retreat. Kathy, being an elementary school teacher, has a week's full of educational and scenic events all planned out. Everyday there is structure (unlike my house). They make gingerbread houses, read, color, and go to all sorts of places like San Francisco, Kelly Park, Intel Museum and shopping. This is literally the most exciting thing about the holidays for my kids. One-on-one 24/7 attention and entertainment and zero TV and video games! She tells me they say this is the best 4 days of the year for them. I say, "Me too!"

So back to the party. The notable people missing this year are the families of Patty, Winford, Kingman, Tom, and KP. The new people are once again, Grace! Grace tells me that she can always count on me to get her "in" to all the parties! Also my mom came along too. Yeah that's right, we needed someone to watch baby so both Chrissy and I could thoroughly enjoy the evening child-free. So while my mom was tending to Justine, Grace was cooking food for my mom in the hotpot. We had to put Grace to work and earn her meal! There's really no true "free" dinner.

Below is a video of Justine chomping on some bread or cake.




Another new addition to the party was the turkey. Ted brought his jumbo deep fryer and fried up a 12 lb. turkey in 30 minutes. Game hens took 4 minutes, lumpia about a minute, and twinkies/cinnamon rolls less than a minute. Oh man, I've never had deepfried twinkies before. I was sooooo good! The cream just drips on your plate with every bite. And just knowing it was cooked with leftover turkey/gamehen/lumpia oil, makes it absolutely the ultimate junk food! With dinners like these, we really took our chances not having Winford-the-paramedic with us. Next year we'll make sure he parks his ambulance outside because next year we're gonna fry up some Snicker bars!

I posted a video so you can see Ted in action.



Below are some more pics including Ted's lovely wife Mary, who is about to give birth any moment now. She is kept on a strict diet of buffalo wings, lumpia and twinkies. With all that grease, the baby should just squirt out!