Birthday week {part 3}

Last night we had our birthday dinner date at The Melting Pot. It's a fondue restaurant, which is fairly obvious to deduce from its name. I've been dying to go there for a while, and we figured a double birthday was a good enough cause.
It might just have been the best meal I've ever had. In. My. Life.
We did their "Big Night Out" thing... which is a themed four course meal for two. The theme is currently "France" which is GREAT because the French know their cheeses. My pictures aren't great because it was a little dark, but everything looked and tasted divine.

For the first course we had this to-die-for cheese fondue made with a white wine base, baby brie, Gruyere, Fontina, and Raclette cheeses, and white truffle cream, bacon and chives.

We dipped fresh veggies, rosemary-garlic bread, and tart green apples in it.

Are you drooling yet?

It gets better. We had amazing salads for the second course, which I forgot to take a picture of. Then the main course came out.

The platter had filet mignon, lobster tail, peppercorn NY strip steak, chicken provencal, roasted garlic-shrimp, duck a l'orange, ratatouille & goat cheese ravioli, and fresh veggies. Everything arrives raw - you cook it yourself.

We chose the Mojo sauce to cook everything in... it was citrus-y and garlic-y and delicious.

You stab something on a skewer and put it in the sauce pot to cook.

They also brought all these little sauces to dip the different cooked things in, one for the steak, one for the chicken, duck etc... and of course, melted garlic butter for the lobster and shrimp.

Everything was just so. darn. good. And it was fun to cook everything to our liking at the table.

The fourth and final course was the chocolate fondue. I'm still speechless about it.

We got the "Yin and Yang" - half milk chocolate, half white chocolate.

The dipping goodies... strawberries, bananas, brownies, cheesecake, marshmallows rolled in cookie crumbs, pound cake, cherries, rice krispie treats...

They also brought us a birthday surprise... our server was quite amazed that we have the same birthday 

Needless to say, we were (and still are) completely stuffed. I realized that we didn't have any recent pictures of "us" so we snapped a few while lounging on the couch when we got home. We figured we may as well do something while we were immobilized from the food. They all turned out awfully, of course. But I'll share a few.

A series of unfortunate pictures:

Thomas: "hang on a second my shirt is choking me"

Then we turned the flash on and blinded ourselves

Floating heads

These are our food coma faces

And a few more pictures, for good measure.

Sigh. Well I guess birthday week is really over now. Good things can't last forever. If it was birthday week all the time, it wouldn't be very exciting at all. Back to normal life this week... and more healthy eating habits :)
It's ok, though. We have lots of fun things to look forward to... Thanksgiving down in New Braunfels with the cousins, and then Christmas in Oregon with the Congdon/Driver clan!