I was going to go out, but hey, the night chose otherwise

The idea for Saturday night was to go out and experience a music show in the city.

But as I entered my house after a day of shenanigans,  I found myself in the kitchen with FIU Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management graduate student Rafaela Dulanto as she was seasoning some thin-cut steaks and asked if I was staying for dinner.

How could I refuse the offer? I went upstairs to freshen up while waiting for the food to be ready and the guests to arrive.

An hour later, I was in the kitchen again alongside my roommate and Rafaela, who were just putting the finishing touches on the meal, all while talking about Asia, watching the trailer for the movie Ted, and drinking red wine.

The four other guests arrived and one by one we moved the party to the dining room. The meal was simple: steak milanesa, butter-nut squash with a cream parmesan-sage sauce, and a garlic tahini kale salad.

“My inspiration is to make sure people get pleasure out of the food I make,” Dulanto said.

It was a pleasure that everyone at the table felt with every bite.

The sweet creamy squash was soft, juicy and a perfect complement to the sour and bitter taste of the kale. The milanesa was tender and full of flavor; some of the guests could not have enough of it and asked for more.

Dulanto was a true professional, standing up in the middle of her meal to cook more milanesa while we continued to dig in for seconds and thirds.

For dessert, Dulanto made hot-fudge brownies with a Guinness flavor ice cream. The brownies were nothing out of the ordinary, but the ice cream was a sweet surprise. As a fan of Guinness already, the ice cream was a success.

It was again a great match of flavor, the dark and heavy taste of the beer blended together with a creamy and soft texture of the ice cream followed by the hot fudge brownie.

“The highlight of the night had to be the warm brownie with the Guinness ice cream. Can’t get better than that,” said Manuel Cedeno, a junior in public relations.

After dinner we moved to the living room for some Frank Sinatra on Pandora and a few glasses of white wine.

By 12:30 a.m.,  we were still active and the energy from the food was running high, so we decided to go visit Churchill’s Pub, the locally famous pub in Little Haiti which never fails to be the host for live music and a good time.

We had a good time running into old friends, but the heavy metal roar of Hawg Jaw was not what we were expecting.

By 3 a.m. we were going to go to News Lounge but before we knew it we were home again.

The driver passed out on the couch and the rest of us who were still alive resorted back to where the night began: the kitchen.

Here, we danced and ate all the left over steak milanesa until there was no more.