One of my favorite things to do is cook food. I am not really good at it, but I enjoy trying new recipes and experimenting in the kitchen. Rick is an excellent chef and mostly cooks around our house. We are lucky that we have good friends that let us experiment our culinary skills and then kindly put up with the food. Luckily we always accompany our dinners with enough wine to make everything taste good. Rick decided he was going to make a rolled turkey breast stuffed with fresh asparagus, portobello mushrooms, and havarti cheese. He also made and incredible angel food cake that he then topped with chilled peaches that had been cooked and then chilled in Port Wine. I am not a huge fan of Port, but this was a pretty excellent dessert.

I was in charge of appetizers. I decided I would try and make some date ramaki. I took fresh dates and cut them open and filled them with a mile blue cheese and then wrapped them in bacon. I put them in the oven and in the midst of getting everything ready for dinner forgot about them. Well of course I burned the hell out of those little bacon wrapped dates. The house filled with smoke and that mean I had to start all over. I ran down to the store and bought new dates, new blue cheese and bacon and started the process all over again. Luckily this time they turned out perfect.

Stacey and Ryan along with Sharadee and Dajun were kind enough to let us experiment our latest food creations on them. We obviously enjoyed our wine during dinner because by the end of dinner we ended up singing Karaoke around the piano. It was a very impromptu Elton John Tribute performance. Stacey sure has numerous expressions and loves the jazz hands while singing, watch for her to compete on the next Singing Bee….we couldn’t find a microphone but she kindly took to the deer antler as a makeshift microphone. Sharadee provided us with an outstanding snip it from The Phantom Of The Opera. The dogs into the action and made the appearance as well. God forbid that they be left out of some important activity. Rick wants to audition for Dancing With The Stars, so he busted out a few moves through out the night. Check out the video below for some hilarious excerpts from our Crazy Karaoke Bunch.