Wine and Cheese....

are really awesome....
and we had a lot of both at our wine and cheese party the other night.

Veggies and dips (my mom made me the dips cause she's cool like that)....

The artistic fruit platter (the berries are "wine" and the pineapple and melon are "cheese", get it?)...

Cheese (and nuts, honey, mustard, jelly, etc)...

Meat and Cheese....

Wine (well wine charms)...

In conclusion, I recommend that you all have a wine (or beer, or Shirley Temple) and cheese party.  Have your friends bring over some cheese and wine of their choosing and then get someone to make something chocolate (like the awesome chocolate fondue we had which I don't have a picture of).  Then add in fruit, veggies, bread, crackers, etc.  Good stuff.  In all we had about 6 types of cheese, a goat cheese ball with basil oil, goat cheese corn cakes, a fruit platter, veggie platter, fondue with strawberries and pound cake, cheese straws, salami, and a ton of crackers and bread.  Luckily we had those veggies and fruit to balance out all the other stuff.  But as always, the best part was the friendships (which I forgot to capture with my camera).

Have you ever hosted a wine and cheese party?

What to Get Your Brother for His Birthday...

All Pictures from Zingermans

Do you know what the hardest thing ever is?  It's trying to figure out what to give your brother for his birthday.  I mean first of all, he is a guy.  Second of all, he is your brother.  You can't pick out clothes for your brother (well I can't).  You already gave him Modern Family Season 1 for Christmas and you are pretty sure he already has access to the TV shows and movies he wants to watch.  Video games and other technology are expensive and how would you even know what to get.  Plus he lives in another state probably (or sometimes another country) and is not good at giving you his address but even when he does, big things are hard to ship.

Then there was that year you thought you'd come up with a good idea for a gift.  Turns out he did not really want the new TLC CD (the band, not the tv channel) even though it featured the hit single  "Waterfalls" (it's in your head now isn't it?  "Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that ya used to.").   He also apparently did not enjoy the hand stenciled t-shirt you gave him a few years back.   Well at least you never saw him wear it.

pic from wiki

You can take the easy way out and get him a gift card (I'm not going to lie, that's what I usually do).  Or you can just make one of those agreements where you decide not to give each other anything at all (but he's in grad school and jobless for the next few months so you feel like you should be nice).  Or you can just think really hard, in your brain and come up with something pretty good, like I think I did this year.

Meat
Cheese
Mustard
Brownies
Huzzah!

Yeah even though my Valentine's Day box of food is long gone, I'm still perusing Zingerman's on the daily, plotting my next purchase.  Then it hit me.  My brother likes food.  I'm pretty sure he likes salami.  I think his favorite sandwich is an Italian Sub (that might have salami on it).  And I've definitely seen him eat chunks of cheese straight out of the fridge at my parent's house.  So yeah I'll make him a box of food from Zingerman's.  Score!

And I think he liked it, unless he's just trying to appease me.  He wrote this in an email to my parents "J-M gave me one of the most exciting gifts I have received in quite some time - hard salami, gourmet cheese, gourmet mustard, and an excellent brownie.  Great work." 

Yay, go me!

PS-I'll be back tomorrow with the details on this weekend's birthday scavenger hunt extravaganza.