Chocolate Panna Cotta + Port Wine Ice Cream

I don't normally make fancy desserts. Cookies and fruit salad are the norm in our household if there even is dessert. But the intense chocolate whatever-it-was with the port wine ice cream that we ate at Poste in DC inspired me. And S.O.'s birthday needed a proper dessert. Usually I make a marble cake if there's time, but one huge cake and three people equals over-indulgence. So we have instead eight helping of panna cotta instead of 20 helpings of cake. And the ice cream will keep and I hope we don't go whole hog (in this case an apt description) and gobble it all down. I'll do photos when the dessert is served. Tonight.

We also have rib eye steaks, baked potatoes with ALL the trimmings, broccoli, and mesclun salad with cherry tomatoes and avocado on the menu. I did this in lieu of all three of us going to a fancy place or a steak house for dinner. These days, that would have been the better part of $200, and instead we are doing it for under $50, and that includes a decent bottle of port which we can savor into the future for a long time. So . . .

Now back to my speech about how I wrote The Shadow Warriors. I hope it is of some interest to the group of administrative assistant professionals who will be the audience. It's always hard to know how interested people are in writing. You wonder. Do they read? What do they read? Do they give two whoops and a holler? I'm redoing a speech I gave years ago and now I realize that speech wasn't very good. Of course hardly anyone heard it because the venue was a downscale suburb and nobody showed up except the librarian and some of my friends. One of those evenings a writer would just as soon forget. Whatever.

Toastmasters is a wonderful organization and has improved my speaking skills greatly, but I still have a ways to go. Goals are good. Self-improvement is good. Promoting one's book is good.

Time to get out of my jammy's. Seems like Saturday.

This morning we had a flicker on the main suet feeder for the first time. Man, that bird is big. Lots of bird business today, and I think I saw a goldfinch, but on the suet not the thistle seed. Is that possible? We have five feeders and it's a job to keep them all full, especially suet in the winter which is soooo popular. I got two big containers from the Audubon society.