1. Carol spearheaded today's family dinner. She created the menu and distributed recipes from the cookbook, Bless this Food. She assigned me to prepare three contributions, all of which were new to me and I was feeling some very low grade anxiety, but I hopped into the Sube, screeched over to Yoke's, bought the ingredients I needed, soared home, and got down to business. Mostly, I hoped the recipes from this cookbook were reliable. Often I like to improvise with recipes. Not today. Today I would stay in each recipe's lane and do my best to fulfill my assignments.
2. Carol assigned me to bake hot crab dip for an appetizer, cook scalloped potatoes as a side dish, and fix each of us a mint julep as a cocktail. The dishes and the cocktail supported Carol's main entree, a baked rack of lamb.
The recipe for the scalloped potatoes frustrated me very slightly in that it called for onion and potatoes in cup measurements. I don't really know how many potatoes or chopped onions constitutes a cup, but I did a little online poking around and satisfied myself that I'd come close to fulfilling the recipe with about four potatoes and a half an onion.
I started by melting butter in a pan and sautéing chopped onion and minced garlic. When they were tender, I stirred in flour and marjoram and immediately added milk, brought the mixture to a low boil, turned down the heat, and stirred it until thickened.
I lined the bottom of a two quart baking dish with parchment paper and created a layer of chopped potatoes. I poured about half of the sauce I'd just made over this layer and added grated Parmigiano Reggiano Stravecchio cheese, created another layer, and put the rest of the sauce and more grated cheese on it. I baked this dish covered for 75 minutes, removed it from the oven, uncovered it, grated more cheese over the top, and then popped in back into the oven for another half an hour. I admit. I was leery about baking this dish for an hour and forty-five minutes, but it seemed all right coming out of the oven.
I was relieved.
With the potato dish ready to go, I focused on the hot crab dip. I had thought about making a special trip to CdA to buy crab meat, but, with my sisters' permission, made this dip with Bumble Bee canned crab meat. If I ever make this dip again, I'll go find crab meat at a seafood counter. I think it would improve the dish a lot. The dip was easy to assemble, just a matter of combining cream cheese, sour cream, a little mayonnaise, grated cheese (I used Mexican), fresh lemon juice, and few other things together and topping it with more grated cheese. I was leery of the 40 minutes baking time, but I trusted the recipe and it turned out great.
3. I really don't think we, as a family, should try, on any given Sunday, to outdo the family dinners we've had before.
And, yet, that's just what we seem to do!
Or, at least we seem to equal the quality of past meals!
Tonight, Carol imagined a splendid meal and, as it turned out, Christy and I succeeded in helping make it work.
Carol's idea was to build a menu around the rack of lamb she roasted.
Since lamb is often served with mint, Carol assigned me to make mint juleps and we all thought it was a superb cocktail. I think, had I not been limited in my bourbon supply, we would have had a second round. The combination of the brown sugary bourbon, the fresh mint, and the drink's sugar cubes were very tasty to all of us.
We enjoyed the crab dip with buttery crackers with our cocktails and then Paul and Carol began to roll out the dinner offerings.
The rack of lamb was beautifully seasoned and Carol served it on the rare side, which I enjoyed. Christy made a gorgeous plate of lightly cooked sugar snap peas, asparagus, and tomatoes and one of my favorite dishes, gingered carrots. She also brought a bottle of Pinot Noir and Gewurtztraminer wine. I held myself in check and drank a small taste of the Gewürztraminer and a glass of Pinot Noir. Both wines were perfect.
Carol also baked rolls from a recipe that called for them to be topped with poppy seeds, but she had an "everything" mix of seeds on hand and her Crusty Everything Rolls were awesome -- I think they were my favorite bread offering we've ever had at family dinner.
We slowly ate our dinner and let our meal settle for a while and Carol topped off this meal she planned by serving us rhubarb pie (with rhubarb she harvested out of my back yard).
It, like the rest of this meal, was perfect. The tart rhubarb and the flaky crust somehow seemed just the right way to bring our rack of lamb dinner to a close.
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