New Year's EvePosted on 2006/01/01 15:50:37 (January 2006). 
The meal, the day, the people involved.
They think it's all over...
It is now!
[31st December 2005]
In the end I guess that the party was one of the most successful in recent years, we all had a lot of fun, we ate like pigs in a stye, and we even had time to play some games.
During the day I had to go to see my father as he's recently got a surgery at his eye, considering that also my sister had to be operated for one of her wisdom teeth, we can say that 2005 wasn't a great year for the family altogether.
Anyways, Dad is ok, a bit in pain, but recovering, he should be back to normality quicker than me, so that is good.
In the afternoon we started preparing our bit of the dinner. Marta proposed that we made home made ravioli, of course everyone accepted, but the problem was the fact that we didn't have the correct rolling pin to make them! This meant a lot of wastage, but in the end we managed to make two different types of ravioli, one filled with potatoes and black cabbage, and one filled with a mix of pork-parma ham-mortadella-parmesan cheese-veal.
The sauce that we made were a rocket-salad cream with nuts for the first type (potatoes and cabbage) and a Roquefort sauce for the others.
Around 5ish Francesco and Elisa joined us to cook their bit of the dinner, fried stockfish and potatoes balls, a sort of dumpling chinese style (for which I made the filling, as I am considered as the expert on far eastern foodstuffs).
We then moved to the main place at Elena's house, where the cooking started again, the whole dinner was made of:
Starters
1. Typical liver "crostini", made by Federico
2. Chinese Dumplings, made by Francesco and Elisa
3. Portugese stockfish fried balls, made by Francesco and Elisa
First Course
4. Potatoes and cabbage ravioli in a rocket-salad and nuts cream sauce, made by me and Marta
5. pork-parma ham-mortadella-parmesan cheese-veal ravioli in a Roquefort sauce, made by me and Marta
Main Course
6. Parmigiana style aubergine, made by Luca and Laura
7. Sausages and beans "uccelletto" style, made by Giovanni
Cakes
8. Meringue and biscuits, made by Mirko
9. Panettone and Pandoro with fused chocolate on top, again Francesco and Elisa
All the quantities were abysmally huge so by the end of the ravioli course we were already full, BUT a way or another we did manage to get to the end of the meal all in one piece.
 A special mention goes to the Sausages, they have been cooked so much in the beans that all the fat passed to the beans by hosmosis, making it the king of evil sausages. As you can see from the picture the dish looks like a black mass sacrificial dish. I strongly believe that it had a mind of its own.
  During several recesses of the meal, between a course and the other, we even assisted to some sheer work of art being created and "ignited" by Luca and Elisa. By this point the average brain activity of the people involved touched a respectable "3 years old" mark.
 Giovanni also brought some fireworks, I love them, I used to spend so much money for New Year's Eve on gunpowdery goods, so it was nice to go back a good 10 years and explode some of the stuff that he had along.Dinner finished around 1 AM, we left at 4ish, quite early for our standards, but we were all rather tired and satisfied of the evening.
Of course at the time of writing I am still digesting the sausages, pure concentrate of evil and fat.
A new year has begun. As usual there are mixed feelings on what it will happen, what choices will have to be made. 2005 wasn't the best of the years, I would like to try to make this one different. It's up to me, no-one else, this has been a key issue in 2005 that didn't quite work, it has been like if I was expecting things to happen. Fortunately during the last part of las year I managed to regain a little control, but there are still too many things that are left untouched, maybe because I am scared to walk difficult paths...
We'll see what happens, in the meantime I'd better go back on the digesting of the sausage!
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