Dinner at the Boss's

Ray and I were invited to dinner at the Manager’s house this past Friday. Ray, if you recall, is the Assistant Manager. The Manager’s name is Andrew and his wife’s name is Katie. Katie also works at the Haddows and Victoria Wine with Ray and Andrew. Ray was really excited about dinner and hanging out, but I was a tad nervous, because the first time I met Andrew I was having one of my tizzy days. The power in our flat had gone out and I didn’t have a phone and I ran down to Ray’s work to call the power company if I hadn’t gotten through to them on my cell (mobile) by the time I got there and get the debit card so that I could top-up (add money to) my cell in case I needed to make any other emergency calls. I was all flustered and I was dressed kind of scrubby, due to having been in the movie theatre all day (Edinburgh International Film Festival). I was really embarrassed, because Ray didn’t want me to meet his co-workers under anything but perfect conditions. So I felt really bad about that. It was one of those days when I wished my face didn’t flush at the slightest sign of temperature change/emotional distress.

As I said, I was a bit nervous. Add that to my wonderful track record of, for whatever reason, instilling in people a dislike of me upon first meeting. To this day I still haven’t figured out what it is that I do that makes people dislike me so much when I first meet them. Is it because I am shy? Do they not like my clothes? Did I not react fast enough to a joke they made? I was once chastised by a friend’s mom and another friend’s sister for not loudly saying hello and all that when I came in. Instead I said “hi” too quietly so hardly anyone heard me and I did a little wave and head nod. And there were like a bunch of people I didn’t know and I was just very quiet. If I feel comfortable I’m not shy, but when I don’t know people, I want to see how they work before I jump in and behave like a crazy cheerleader. Can’t people just be shy and hang on the fringe of things without being “insulting” to other people?

In an attempt to win brownie points that evening I had, at Ray’s request, come up with a delicious dessert to bring with me, even though I was a bit flustered because Ray refused to ask whether or not they had a dessert for the night made. I wanted to make mini-chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese filling, vanilla butter cream frosting and slices of strawberries (Devil's Delight).

I went out grocery shopping that morning for the ingredients, then went to the gym, and then went home to start cooking. I spent roughly 4-5 hours making 80+ mini muffins. I had to use up all the batter. And then I had to pick the best looking muffins to frost and top with a strawberry to take with us. I was really proud of how the muffins turned out. I have officially decided that I am a muffin master. Forget cakes, muffins are my favorite thing to make. You can do all sorts of things with muffins. My only concern is that if I want to make muffins from scratch I won’t be able to find the various ingredients that I want or that I’ll have to pay a lot if I want to purchase them. I’m still getting used to the shopping aspect of living here. There really aren’t any big stores where you can get everything. Drug stores are separate from the stores that have various K-Martish/Wal-Martish stuff like school supplies and some basic home supplies. Some stores, like Woolworths, don’t even carry cleaners, Windex or paper towel. It’s really all rather inconvenient and frustrating at times.

Moving on from the cupcakes. I slaved over those all afternoon in preparation for that evening. Ray got home around 2:30, I think. It might have been 3. Either way, we both had plenty of time to get ready. My back was really starting to get sore from standing up and all that all day. After showering off all the cakey/frosting goodness, I got ready. Ray was really anxious to leave and was timing everything, even the walk to Andrew’s flat! Ray took me the long way around, where we walk down Dalry. I knew there was a short-cut behind Dalry, but I didn’t want to take it because I didn’t know exactly where his boss lived. I got him to go the way that I was the most comfortable, instead of walking down the narrow sidewalk of Dalry. We went up to Dundee Street and took the underpass over to Dalry. I was carrying Ray’s Blair Athol Scotch Whisky and he was carrying the tray of cupcakes.

We finally arrived on the street where Andrew supposedly lived and Ray walked down to the 20s and started looking for Andrew’s last name on the buzzers. Lucky for Ray it was the first one he checked. I wasn’t sure if we should buzz, even though the door was open. Ray thought I was being fussy about it, but then they know we’re downstairs and won’t be all frazzled when we come to the door. So we buzzed it and then they buzzed us in, even though we didn’t need it. Then, as with all my friends apparently, we trudged up several flights of stairs. Ray said he lived on the third floor. What we seem to keep forgetting is that the third floor is actually the fourth floor! It goes Basement, Ground Floor, Floor One, Floor Two, etc. So my office and my friend Jack’s apartment are on the 4^th floor, not the lovely third floor, even though they are listed as the third floor. Get it? Ok.

On the door of their flat was a cute little doorbell thing. It made me wish we had one, because I hate having to strain to hear if people are knocking or not. Then again, do I really need a doorbell when I want to hide from those random door knockers? Andrew answered and then laughed at us for being so Americanly On-Time! Ray got a good handshake welcome and I had to do that double cheek thing! I’ve never done that before, so I was a little freaked and then started wondering if I did it right. If I was supposed to actually kiss the cheek or just make the noise. Maybe the crazy is starting to seep out a little too much right now. So let me move on to more interesting things.

Andrew gave us a quick tour of his flat. The kitchen, which was its own room and you could actually move and store stuff in it. They even had this huge steel fridge! Fridge-Envy! And the two bedrooms that they have in their flat, which were very nice and spacious and then the living room/dining room. They had a TV mounted on the wall and this large red cabinet type thing that, from what I could see, had a stereo and CDs and things in it. And then. . . the awesome leather couches that Ray adored. They weren’t the soft leather we had, but they were oh so very comfy.

After getting a little settled (Katie was putting Finley down. . . Finley is their son), Ray and Andrew went down to one of the two wine stores to get some wine and I was left all alone in the living room with the fish. There was a goldfish in the bowl in the corner of the room and I swear he was making weird bubbling noises at me. I even got up to check it out. He was a very dubious fish.

Ray and Andrew made it back in time for me to not panic over the length of my awkward loneliness and watching some random woman in the apartment across the way play on her computer while the fish bubbled threats at me from across the room. Katie joined us in the living room. I forget at what point I met Andrew’s other son, but he appeared, said hi, and went to his bedroom to hang out doing. . . well.. I wouldn’t really know to be honest. There was a fooseball table in the room, but Ray stood in front of me during the whole tour and as many of you know, Ray is much taller than I am, so I had to kind of imagine what some things looked like. Andrew had told us dinner would be late, but we were entertained enough that time flew by.

Andrew told Ray that he wanted to cook a traditional Scottish meal for us and so he did. First we had Cullen Skink, which is a delicious white-fish soup with potatoes and onions. It was really delicious! Ray joked about how he adds pepper to everything, so he added pepper. I opted not to add pepper and enjoyed the soup as prepared. The whole table was decked out with the “nice china” and it had all the different silverwares you’d use for each course. They even had candles lit! It was really neat! Andrew and Katie served us everything, which was so nice of them. I have a feeling they feel the same way about entertaining company that I do, which is a good thing.

The second course was the haggis. I know I’ve mentioned haggis before, but in case you forgot, this is what it is: sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach for approximately three hours. The first time I had it we were at Fort Williams on our Highland trip. Ray didn’t have a bite when one of the people on our trip was offering little bits to taste. I actually liked it. It kind of tasted like meatloaf. The second time we had it was on Burns Night at the Caley Sample Room next door to us, but they spiked the haggis with Drambuie (a scotch-honey liqueur). Ray was not impressed with that. But this. . . this was delicious! Andrew brought out the haggis still in the stomach sacks and he ran over to his computer and wanted to read the traditional Burns Night reading that goes with serving the haggis. While Andrew read, he keyed Ray as to when to cut and serve and all that. Ray was so caught up in the excitement, he cut the haggis the wrong way (a-duh… vertical not horizontal!... Ray gets a little ditzy like that sometimes) and Katie insisted Andrew come back over and sit down. And we were each served half a stomach full of haggis. Num! And then there were neeps (mashed turnips) and tatties (plain mashed potatoes). Katie noticed that the neeps were not too neepy and said that we should maybe leave the neeps to the side. We did, and even without eating the neeps I was totally stuffed! I couldn’t even finish my haggis and tatties. I had mixed together my tatties and haggis, because they taste even better when eaten together (even though separately they were still delicious) and so I had this little mixed square on my plate when Katie came to take it away. It was kind of funny.

Then there was the dessert. I was like… oh goodness… there isn’t anymore room in my tummy for dessert! Despite the fact that I had only eaten breakfast at 8:30AM, my nerves had made me really full. But there was no way I was going to pass up what they brought out next: Cranachan! Can I just say my mom would have totally loved this dessert! It is made from a mixture of whipped cream, whisky, honey, and fresh raspberries topped with toasted oatmeal. And they had it all prepared in these glasses and it was just so pretty and so delicious. The raspberries were wonderful! I think the last time I had raspberries I was on one of my trips and me and the girls I was with found wild raspberries. It was really great!

Someone then brought out the cupcakes, but I wasn’t sure who. My memory is a little hazy during and after dessert. So everyone had a cupcake. Apparently they were really sweet, but it was the butter cream frosting that was really sweet. I tried not to slather it on so that everything else would still taste good, but you never know what a day or two will bring. At least I think everyone liked them. I know I really enjoyed the few I had when tasting them prior to bringing them over. Woohoo for cupcakes!

After that we all just sat around talking. We talked about all sorts of random things. I remember there was a conversation about fajitas and how fajitas don’t have rice, but Ray insisted rice should go in the fajita. I joked that they serve rice on the plate with the rest of the stuff you put in your fajita, so why shouldn’t rice go in the fajita? It was kind of funny. One of the dinner conversations turned to talking about the Edinburgh Military Tattoo and how awesome it is. So hopefully Ray is more excited about it now than he was. We also talked about grocery stores and Andrew is on the opposite side of the people I have talked to. He is a Sainsbury man, whereas all my friends are Tesco-peeps. We thought it was interesting, especially since we’re in the middle and shop at Scotmid. Haha!

And there was a really funny story. . .okay. . . there were more than one funny story, but I can’t tell the “Finley Go” story in writing, because it just wouldn't be as funny without knowing Finley or hearing Andrew tell it. So the story I can tell is the one about Poland and Haggis. Andrew used to work at the British Embassy in Poland. On one occasion he had to arrange a Burns Night Supper and needed to order haggis from Scotland. Haggis is considered “livestock”, which is why you can’t get real haggis in the states or other places. So he had it shipped from Scotland on dry ice via diplomatic immunity so that it could be brought in. Andrew and the driver went to pick it up at the airport, but airport security/customs was not at all happy and didn’t want him bringing “livestock” into the country under diplomatic immunity. Andrew didn’t know what to do and was ready to just take the boxes and ignore the guys, when his driver kept saying “just open the box.” So Andrew opened one of the boxes and heaps of dry ice smoke swarmed out of the box and the security guys booked it across the tarmac. Andrew said the guards thought they were going to have wild haggis running all over the tarmac and wanted to get out of there! I busted out laughing, especially when I remembered a picture of a fictional wild haggis I had seen prior to the visit:

Oh it had us in stitches it was sooooo funny!

At some point, Katie was really tired and went off to bed. I was feeling her tired too, but I somehow got embroiled in a discussion over nuns and film and why nuns and the bureaucracy of University. Or… the politics of the University system. Either way, it was something several people have off-handedly said to me before and here was another person telling me it’s all about the politics. But even though I knew it would be inevitable to discuss nuns in film at 1:30AM, I was glad it happened because it jarred things a little bit for me. So now I can keep plugging away at my First Year Review. It was fun though.

Finally, it was time for the night to come to an end. Andrew walked us out and talked for a little bit before we set off on our way home, which was admittedly a wee bit faster with my shortcut. It was a really fun night out. They even mentioned that we should get together again and that they were available in a fortnight (which is 2 weeks… yeah… took me a little while to learn that). I felt bad that we stayed so late, but Ray and Andrew were having so much fun. If it weren’t for us women, would men ever really go to bed?

On our walk home, we were hoping to make it back to the flat without incident. We were only a block away from our flat when a young person approached us and wanted us to buy his grocery bag full of chips so he could get a taxi home. Then he said we could take them for free. It’s all part of a bet and he can’t get a taxi home until someone takes these chips. We said why don’t you throw them away? He said he couldn’t, because he had to get rid of them legitimately. We were really creeped out and saw that a police vehicle was parked in front of our flat and the guy stopped following us as we got closer to the police car. It was 3:30AM by the time we got home. When we got inside, we were like “we should have taken the chips and then threw them away for him.” It was just a really creepy situation and we wanted to get home. But we actually think the poor kid wasn’t lying. We just didn’t understand what was going on.

The night, overall, was a success and even though I had a really hard time waking up the next day (I didn’t get up until 1PM), poor Ray had to go to work and wake up at 9AM. But he made it and then enjoyed roughly 3 days off (2 full days and an evening and morning off). I found out later that Andrew was glad we didn’t bring wine with us, because that always makes him a little mad (I WORK AT A WINE STORE). So even though my muffins were sweet, they were glad to get something other than wine. Brownie points all around.