Housewarming

After having lived in our house for over a month, the four of us finally got our schedules sufficiently in sync to be able to hold a housewarming a couple of weekends ago. We’d all thought that our new home, with its open-plan design and spacious areas, would be perfect for parties, but now we have indisputable evidence that it is. At least I know that I had a great time.

We decided to run with a Mexican theme (my idea), and dinner was a taco bar. We provided the mince, freshly made tortillas, and guacamole, and then we asked the guests to bring various other items (cheese, tomatoes, beans, etc.) in lieu of housewarming gifts. Making the tortillas was almost a necessity since the objects that pass for flour tortillas in Australia more resemble round sheets of vinyl than anything edible. They even come sealed in plastic bags with a shelf life of a year or two. Consequently, I’ve had to become a tortilla maker the past few years. I have to say, though, that these were the best batch I’ve ever pulled off—light and tender. I guess practice starts to make perfect.

Dinner preparations did not go off without a hitch, however. Our cooking appliances are gas, but our house is not actually connected to the mains, maybe because we’re so far back from the street. Instead, we have bottled gas, and, when we moved in, there was still a partially filled bottle connected, so we’d just been using that, not knowing exactly when it would run out. Naturally, it ran out late at night the Thursday before our festivities. I rang first thing the next morning to request another bottle, but that was when I discovered that the delivery trucks leave before 7:00 every morning. I was told that I could pick up the replacement bottle myself but that I’d have to transport it upright. Strangely enough, none of us owns a truck with a rack on the back…so we just had to agree to wait til the next week. That left us gasless over the weekend.

Thankfully, Keiran’s family had given him an electric frypan when we moved into our new house. It’s not the world’s best electric frypan, not exactly getting as hot as one might like, but it was better than nothing. It handled three dozen flour tortillas followed by 2.5kg of beef mince. Granted, it took about three hours to pull all this off, but, by the time most everyone had arrived, we were ready to eat.

And eat we did. Our dining table was groaning under the weight of a fiesta at the beginning of the night, and many of us were groaning under portions of the same weight by the end of the night. Though of course there was still room at the very end for the ice cream that someone had brought. Fortunately, after having joked that our dining room was better suited for dancing than for eating, I now have conclusive proof of that proposition as well, having given it a good swing-dance workout that night as something of a counterbalance to all the eating.

I think people had a good time. We’d planned to play some Night Games in the park behind and to the side of our house, but people seemed content to sit (both inside and outside), eat, drink, and talk. The last guest went home about 2:00 AM, so I’ll take that as a good sign. And the house definitely feels much warmer now. It’s such a blessing to have a home that can handle a crowd of friends.