I love food.  Most of you who know me probably consider that an understatement 🙂  I do believe that if any other girl challenged me to an eating contest, I would surely always come out the victor.  Don’t believe me?  Well, you should 🙂

So, when my good friend Sarah decided that we should go to this fancy dinner at an Orchard not too far from here, and I heard that I’d be able to sample twenty-five different dishes, I was raising my hand before she even finished telling me about it.  Yes, yes, yes.  Count me in.  

And the fact that it was just going to be five women, and NO kids.  Well, all the better!  A relaxing meal time.  I don’t get too many of those around here.  

We had a really fun time.  We ate in the this big, amazingly decorated barn.  Everywhere you turned, there were beautiful arrangements of . . . stuff.  Vegetables, flowers, fruits, wreaths. . . 

The food was nothing like what I would ever cook.  The ingredient lists were crazy.  If I ever tried to make anything they served, I would use every pot in my house, every utensil in my drawer and my dirty dish pile would spill into the living room.  Good thing they cooked it for me.  

I would’ve loved to have gotten better pictures.  But the barn was lit by candles, and had really high ceilings.  I wasn’t about to bust out my big old flash in the middle of a fine dining experience.  So I just boosted my ISO to obnoxious levels, tried to hold the camera as still as I could, and crossed my fingers that I would come away with something decent.  

I do wish we had a better picture of the five of us.  But when you ask a complete stranger to take a picture with a camera that weighs ten times what they are normally used to, and they actually have to look through the little glass square with their eye to see what they are pointing at–Well, it’s a bit intimidating for anyone who’s not used to it.  So I got about ten blurry pictures of all of us.  And just one that I would consider decent.  So there you have it.  

I would love to do it again sometime.  But find a place that wasn’t going to kick us out after an hour and a half, leaving us to stand in a little circle outside before we went our separate ways.  Huddled and shivering in the thirty degree weather, for forty-five minutes.  Chatting like school girls.  Loving such an amazing thing as a friendship–sharing your life with a group of women who love you for your heart and not for anything that you aren’t, or haven’t been yet, or hope to be but just can’t quite get there.  Just for me.  Bethany.  And I love them for their hearts too.  Women after God’s own heart.  They are such good examples for me.