A ratatouille double date.

I used to be that girl that thought double dates were gushy and cheesy.  It was probably because I had never been in a relationship before and was half envious that people could even have double dates (doubly rubbing in my face that I was not in one), with the other half of me over-imagining what double dates were like, giving them more weight than the reality needed to have.

When Nathan and I hang out with Will and Kat, it's nice because we were all friends before we started dating so getting together is more like having dinner with friends that just happen to be dating.  We're not dating couples that have to try to figure out how to be friends.  Nothing has to be formal or awkward.  It's pretty sweet.

Layers of vegetables for ratatouille!

This should technically be a really old post because this dinner happened a while ago.  I don't really remember what inspired this dinner - I think I might've just seen a recipe for it in passing for something else and remembered how I'd been wanting to test out a recipe ever since I watched the awesome kids' movie, Ratatouille.  I wasn't really into cooking back then, but I knew I wanted to try it out one day.

The finished product

Ratatouille is super easy to make - you chop up a bunch of vegetables and voila, ratatouille.  You can probably tell from my pictures that I didn't have enough cheese to lay across the top of the dish, but I think it still turned out okay.

Chocolate bowls epic fail

Nathan attempted to make chocolate bowls for dessert.  We got some balloons and dipped them in this chocolate ganache-like sauce that he made to put them in the freezer.  Except the chocolate didn't harden enough by the time we wanted dessert, and the chocolate just stuck to the balloons.  So we ended up throwing some vanilla ice cream and banana rum sauce onto the tray and scraping the chocolate right off of the balloons.

Yeah...I know.  I think I only had one and mostly scraped chocolate off of the tray.

Sweet potato fajita night in the McNamara house!

This dinner was also from a long time ago.  We had a bunch of sweet potatoes and I had been wanting to make these sweet potato fajita things for me and Sarah, and since we had recently gotten avocados, we whipped up some guacamole and put together a mini-fiesta for ourselves.

Oddly, I've been finding that I've beginning to experiment a little more when it comes to cooking.  If there's a specific dish I'm trying to make, I'll follow the recipe as closely as possible, but if I'm just trying to figure out something to eat with out having to look a recipe up, I'll just experiment with ingredients and spices and herbs.  It's odd because I wouldn't normally do that kind of thing.  I guess it just shows how far I've come in the world of possibilities.

P.S.  It would've been the perfect end to the night if we actually watched Ratatouille that night, but alas, we didn't have access to the movie.  I'm still in the mood to watch it if anyone has it/wants to watch it with me!