Fancy Dinner Party

Kevin and I had been wanting to cook a leg of lamb for a while. This isn't the sort of thing you can really just pick up and cook for two people. It's a lot of food. So we decided to have a dinner party. And when Sarah got her doctorate on her husband's birthday shortly before a college friend came to visit, well it was the perfect confluence of events to warrant a fancy dinner party. Not that we really needed a reason beyond wanting to eat lamb, but it's always nice to have something to celebrate.

I remained impressively calm throughout the experience. Kevin may disagree with this statement, but anything he calls stressing, I call planning. I mean, you need to figure out the menu and buy all the food and make sure everything's cooked on time. Figuring out the details is a necessary step.

We settled on a menu that was pretty easy to time. Soup and dessert were made early in the day. The potatoes were cooked in the toaster over. Roasted asparagus can be completed in the time it takes to carve the lamb. And if my scalloped potatoes were a little undercooked, Kevin's roasted potatoes were perfect.

 

We even remembered to put all the food on the table. Everything was delicious, although we drank entirely too much wine. I'm struggling right now between wanting to just buy kitchen things (particularly a larger variety of bakeware) and holding off until after the wedding.

At any rate, dinner was a wild success. We're getting better at hosting large dinners, which means I'm feeling almost no stress about Thanksgiving. Except for the part where I actually don't think we have enough plates for everyone we've invited. But we'll make do. In the meantime it turns out that good friends and food and wine is all you really need for an awesome evening. Even if it does result in a somewhat less than awesome morning/early afternoon.