Dinner party!

Did everyone have a good weekend? It was our last weekend without Bailey so Rominal and I took advantage of our time together. Saturday, we had Mom and Howard, and Donna and Mark over for dinner. Rominal was going to make beer butt chicken, but Saturday morning he came downstairs and said, why don’t you make this instead. He handed me a recipe for Buttermilk chicken. That was his way of saying, “I don’t feel like cooking today.” The recipe was from the PBS TV show Everyday Food. We happened to have the episode taped and we sat down and watched it. It looked easy enough (my qualifier for a good recipe) and so we decided to make that. It turned out really well.

I also made Erin’s French bread, which was fun to do too. I had a Lucile Ball moment while making the bread. I put the dough in a bowl and set it in aside to let it rise for an hour. After an hour, I punched it down and set it aside again to let it do the second rise. Since it was supposed to rise in a warm area, I put the bowl in the microwave, which was slightly warmer than my house. I went upstairs to take my shower and get ready. I came back downstairs and opened up the microwave to find that the dough had way more than doubled in size, and had busted out of the plastic wrap that was covering the bowl and was now oozing all over the microwave. It was similar to an old scary movie – something along the lines of attach of the bread dough.

We finished off our meal with a giant chocolate covered strawberry. Jae had sent me a box of them as a thank you for spending last weekend with us. She’s always doing thoughtful things like that. The strawberries were the perfect ending to an evening of good company, and if I do say so myself, pretty good food. Oh, speaking of Jae, the last time she came to visit us she sent me a set of really cool dishes, each one is a different color and has a different vegetable on it. We used those for the salad on Saturday night and I always get great compliments on them. They are fun to use.

So, Mom asked for copies of all of the recipes that I used. So, to make it easy for me, here’s the menu and recipes.
Buttermilk baked chicken with Spinach salad
French bread - side note here - I didn't have corn meal or wheat germ as Erin's recipe calls for, so I used (what else) parchment paper! It worked great!
Smashed Potatoes - mine never look like hers, but they are still darn good.
Watermelon (no recipe here, just slice up some fresh watermelon silly!)
Chocolate dipped strawberries (sorry, no recipe again)

Now, go do some cooking!