This has been a week for festivities. It's nice to have a community of friends and family.
On Thursday, I went to a special dinner organized at the Blue Heron with 5 courses each served with a kind of BBC beer that was also used in the cooking. The first course was an appetizer of oysters with a vinaigrette made with Gold Spike Ale. For the second course, we had local farm-raised barramundi with a sauce made from River Ale. My favorite was the third course, with rabbit sausage, a mustard sauce with ham, and braised cabbage, served with Steel Rail. The sausage was exquisite and the sauce perfect. The cabbage was fine, but couldn't live up to the rest. The main course was a beef short-rib with horseradish mashed potatoes and shallots and carrots. Delicious (served with Drayman's Porter). The desert had chocolate cake with coffee ice-cream (made with the Coffeehouse Porter, which includes fair-trade coffee). I was supposed to go with Buzz but, at the last minute, he couldn't make it. So I went with Zane instead. Alisa doesn't like beer and couldn't go anyway because she was in the AEF Trivia Bee.
On Friday, Zane, Robbie, and Randy came over for a pre-halloween party. Robbie and Zane came on time, but Randy didn't show up. So we called him and eventually convinced him to join us for a bit.
And last night, of course, was halloween. I didn't go to any parties, but it was festive to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters. We didn't get that many because the weather was poor. But the boys had a great time putting together their costumes and trick-or-treating.