Food Coma

Today.... 'er, yesterday, February 23rd, was my husband's birthday.

Friends of ours (let's call them Sam, Renee, and their daughter Ida) conspired with me to make it a good, relaxed one. They offered to cook. [I was unable to convince them to save themselves the trouble of cooking and cleaning, and BOY am I glad I was unable to convince them! They are kick-ass cooks!]

I was in charge of cake, ice cream, and wine. [I don't cook. And when I do cook, most people wish I hadn't!] They were in charge of the most awesome Pakistinian food on the planet.

The cake was vanilla cake, with vanilla frosting, with vanilla custard and strawberry preserve layers. Yumm!

The ice cream was French vanilla, and also chocolate raspberry truffle. [Because the 2 adult females and 1 child female in our little party NEED chocolate, thank-you-very-much.]

Renee had promised Ida that she could bake cookies for my husband, so just to increase the risk of diabetes, we also had some oh-so yummy and chewy chocolate chip cookies. [Which were actually baked in the end by Renee instead of Ida. :) ]

The wine was Amazir, 4 bottles of it, purchased from a local Morrocan food restaurant called "Chef Karim's". Amazir is Amaz-ing. Smooth, red wine that you can drink w/o hardly any of the red wine sharpness that can make it hard to have more than one glass. No, this is some stuff that you can seriously pound down w/o realizing you are pounding it down. [BTW, Chef Karim's is an AWESOME place to eat. If my friends hadn't cooked, it would probably have been where the 5 of us would have gone.]

The Pakistinian food was a beef kabob dish that roughly looked like light-colored hamburger patties and tasted like heaven. I know there was stuff finely chopped and mixed into the kabob's, but I couldn't identify it... just that they rocked. Then there was the chicken... melt-in your mouth chicken that was swimming in an incredible sauce in the pot. Nan, which I'm probably not spelling right, and is this flat bread that melts in your mouth. Raita, this yogurt and cucumber and cilantro and... other finely chopped veges "salad" that tasted good in it's own right, and is also there to help your tongue recover... because everything else you just ate except for the Nan has tried to burn your tongue off! :)

They also picked up an appetizer from an Indian restaurant. Some kind of meat + vege cooked inside a pastry, with some sweet sauces.

Well, all of us have been on this diet. Our friends had gone off of it, and my husband was mostly off of it, but I still have alot of pounds to go before I can totally quit. But today was "cheat day", so off I went.

Everyone achieved food coma status by the end of the meal. 5 of us had cake, 4 of us had ice cream, all 5 of us had at least 1 cookie. I'm pretty sure all of us had 2nds of most of the Pakistinian dishes.

I forgot my stomach has shrunk on this diet.

You just can't stop at one serving of their food. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed their cooking on this diet, until their heavenly ambrosia touched my tongue. I had a little too much of everything, and then when I reached dessert, because I haven't had ice cream in months (except a little from their daughter's plate when we went out about a month ago), I gorged. And well, you have to have a nice glass of milk when you eat even just one cookie.

So between all of the food, dessert, milk, and the 1.5 glasses of Amazir, I suddenly realized my stomach was entirely too full, my blood sugar was through the roof, and I felt like I was going to hurl!

I took a good long walk outside in the cold air, w/o a jacket, until the cold air burning my lungs felt worse than my stomach. Thankfully by that time, my stomach had calmed down, and I'd burned off some of that sugar overkill. Meanwhile, my husband and Sam were enjoying the Scotch that Sam, Renee (and Ida, in spirit :) ) had given him.

When we got home, fed the dogs, and went to bed, I realized I felt more tired than I had in a long time. I was crashing bad from that sugar rush. It felt like I'd been doing hard manual labor, but w/o the normal amount of muscular ache.

Oh-my-gosh. I am never eating that much sugar or food again! Heh, heh, "we all say the same prayer then... say it with me... 'I swear that I will never do this again, (for how long?) for as long as I live.' And some of us have that little addition, 'and this time I mean it!'"

I think my husband had a much better birthday than if we'd had a ton of friends at it, at a big restaurant or something. He needed to be able to relax, laugh, and gripe freely, as needed. And we were within walking distance of home, so if the Amazir did both of us in, we could wobble on home. Which we did, but I think more from food coma than the alcohol... at least for me. :)

Happy Birthday, Love. :) Hope your food coma isn't too bad.