Friday, June 17, 2016

The underwater dinner

Back by popular demand (in particular, K-daughter's insistence that this dinner is "traditional"), last night we hosted our traditional annual Underwater Dinner.

The weather cooperated all-too-perfectly, giving us torrential downpours all day long.  

Indeed, here's me as a shark, swimming through the waters of our living room:

We made some changes from last year's menu.  Last year, the menu included fish sticks, but this year I couldn't bring myself to purchase processed-food-wrapped in trash, so we had tilapia and shrimp. And it was really easy to ask our local fish market to put the food in our glass containers instead of in paper/plastic.
  

Of course, we weren't entirely health-conscious.  We also got trash-free Swedish Fish (caught fresh this morning???)

And pasta shells and goldfish crackers, both in recyclable cardboard containers.  That together with teriyaki collard greens disguised as seaweed rounded out the meal.

The other change from last year was how I used the Swedish Fish.  Last year, I had the brilliant idea to submerge the Swedish fish in individual glasses of blue jello, like fish in an aquarium.  Totally adorable, except (a) my family doesn't really like jello, and (b) the fish started dissolving in the jello, getting a icky texture.  So this year, we opted for a school-of-fish cake.  (I used paste-food coloring to dye the icing).

This little half-cake was the perfect size for us, and worked great as K-daughter's birthday cake!
She's 24 . . . like the candles?
Who all showed up at the dinner? (J-son is off at a boxing match, and my husband was at a fathers' group). So in addition to our host daughter Y and N-son (somehow I didn't get pictures of them), we had Ursula the Sea Witch . . .

Love those tentacles!

. . . and a lifeguard with a little swimmer (Ursula is holding a lobster that was Baby-A's costume last year).


Good thing the lifeguard was there!  Because she could protect everyone from dangerous sharks!


Afterward dinner was over, we had a great time listening to the Beach Boys; Baby A and I danced a lot.   Baby A found a book on my shelf and started "reading" it to her mother.  You can see that Baby A totally takes after me.
"Your Money or Your Life".  Never too early to start thinking about personal finance!


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