Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Reading is Fun!

My birthday was a little while ago, on July 21 to be exact, which, as many of you know, was also Harry Potter D-Day. To celebrate the latter, the stranglies (my core group of friends) and I had a reading party at Potaty's house. I wanted to blog about this shortly after it happened, but had no suitable medium, so I am belatedly gushing about it now.

A strangly reading party is like a cross between primary school Silent Reading and a Roman feast. There was so much food; in fact we didn't even get round to reading until about 1pm, mostly because of food (and the lining up outside borders for an hour, which we felt pretty stupid about since we'd got sucked in to the pre-ordering hype -- if we hadn't we would have been in and out of Kmart in a heartbeat).

Uggy found a recipe for pumpkin pasties which turned out totally cute and tasty:

Potaty, at my request, made a cake with Harry Potter stenciled onto it in icing sugar:

She says it didn't turn out as well as she wanted, but I think it looked pretty awesome.

The Wench made hand pies, which are basically pasties about the size of your hand, with delicious vegie and sausage fillings. She also made puff pastry cups with a lime filling, which has a proper name but I've forgotten what it is. It may be on her blog, Kitchen Wench, or it may not be. Either way you're in for a treat if you follow that link.

My contribution was to get all kinds of edibles that don't require cooking and assemble them on a platter. I like low-maintenance food.

This is the spread we ended up with, minus the hand pies, which were still in the oven when I took this (click image for a large version):

And then, while we were eating, Potaty made balloon representations of most of the main characters, plus the confirmed and possible Horcruxes. The Horcruxes had tickboxes on them to indicate whether they'd been destroyed or not, and we were going to tick them off as we went along, but we all read at different speeds so we decided against.

We wrapped ourselves in blankies to do the actual reading, and it was fun and happy, but eventually I found the others too distracting so went home to read in bed.

I love strangly reading parties. We're going to have to find another series to obsess about, now.

5 comments:

gumtreefid farmer said...

you are the best humans ever. i love you all.

gumtreefid farmer said...

wouldn't it be great if i commented on every post you make just telling you how much i love you? wouldn't i be just the best (virtual) friend ever?

man i'm good.

Gauri said...

aunty kant - except not everyone knows you're my friend so you could just be a stalker. stalkerrr. the cat just ripped open my toe

of thieves said...

ahhh i love that!! silent reading cross roman banquet. also, i feel like my name is actually ugsula.

Gauri said...

ugsula - i think that's your name too!!!! i haven't updated this blog in ages, i think i shall right now.

hey ugsula katy and i are going to start a writing workshopping group over the internets with people we are friends with, you should join! anyway we are making a little flier so i will send it to strangly and then you can join or i'll take you off my life friends list.