Office Party

Last night was our office Christmas party. Yes, I know it was January 6, but that was really the first opportunity we had to get together since the holidays.

Ron, me, my boss, his wife and our regional sales manager met last night at 6:00 p.m. at Buca di Beppo's. Surprisingly, we had a great time. For a dinner that started at 6:00 p.m., we never walked out of the restaurant last night until 9:30 p.m. Holy cow!

We had a great waiter, who was willing to let us take our time and just ordered one course at a time. And boy, did we order courses.

Everyone has had good Italian food, so I'm not going to give a run down of everything we had. But I do want to mention a few things I had that really surprised me that I liked them as much as I did.

One of the salads we ordered was called the Warm Tomato and Spinach Salad with balsamic dressing, goat cheese and roasted pecans. I highly recommend this if anyone goes to Buca Di Beppo's. I could have done without the goat cheese but the rest of it was the bomb. I didn't know before last night how much I liked raw spinach.

One other dish I want to mention was one of our entrees. Veal Saltimbocca. Wow! This is something I've never even heard of before. Words just can't describe how good this was. It was thin slices of veal and it had a little lemony flavor, there were capers and artichoke hearts on here as well. Who'd have thought it would be something I'd eat. But I seriously scarfed it down.

This restaurant is all family style. That means they bring out all the food on platters for the table to share, from the salads to the desserts. There are no "individual" servings. As they take courses off of the table, the pack up whatever is left into to go containers. Somehow, when you're all done, this bag full of food appears on the table. There was a little bit of almost everything. No one wanted to take the leftovers home. My boss said since I don't cook, we should take the leftovers home with us. Hey, who am I to argue with this man?

We have a ton of leftovers in our fridge. I know we don't have any of the spinach salad left, but I think we have some of every other food we had last night. We could easily feed about four more people! Anyone in the neighborhood and hungry, c'mon over! We'll share!