Cucumber sandwiches. Chocolate cake. Burgers. Poutine. Free-flowing conversations that bring out all sorts of awesome things I didn’t know about my friends. Mmm.

Cucumber sandwiches, roughly based on this cooks.com recipe:

• Peel 2 medium-sized cucumbers (or 1 large cucumber) and remove the seeds. Grate it.
• Mix the cucumber with 1 tsp salt. Put it in a strainer, put the strainer in a bowl, and keep it in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
• Mix a softened 8-oz package of cream cheese, 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce, and 1/2 tsp garlic salt.
• Stir cucumber into the cream cheese mix. Spread on buttered bread.
• Refrigerate until ready to serve.

The chocolate cake was roughly based on the Portal recipe, except I was out of whipped cream, so I didn’t do the white dollops with cherries on top, or the candle. So it was really more like Black Forest cake. 

I always stress out in the lead-up to these get-togethers. Is the house reasonably clean? (“I promise, this kitchen was clean-ish before I started frosting this cake…”) But then people come, and the conversation gets going, and it’s awesome.

Catching a break before I clean up the kitchen. Happy.