My friend Ai Ling was in Washington for the summer, so yesterday she and her fiancé Kris took the train in to visit for an afternoon. It was a very short afternoon (they arrived at the train station at 12:45 and left at 17:30, and there was about an hour of bus commute in each direction as well), so we could really only do one thing. That turned out to be midday dinner, since I was determined to cook for them. I don't get many chances to prepare a nice meal for guests.
The menu was chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and biscuits. Jeff and I made everything from scratch, of course, and it all came out really lovely. Each dish is fairly easy to make, at least individually. The difficulty is that if you succeed at making everything come out at the same time (which is nominally the goal), you need at least 6 hands at the end because everything needs to be done at once: keeping the steak warm while you make the gravy, mashing the potatoes and mixing in the warmed milk and butter, boiling the water and putting in the corn at the right time, taking the biscuits out of the oven and covering them to stay warm. It's a feat of organization!
Jeff pretty much took charge of mashed potatoes and steak; I did corn and biscuits and set the table etc. We had blueberry juice to drink, which was nice but not as nice as I had expected, and more expensive than it was worth. I forgot to plan for dessert, as well, but we took it as an opportunity to drag Ai Ling and Kris through Fremont and to Cold Stone, where they mix ice cream to order and on the spot (I had sweet cream ice cream with fudge and caramel, mmm).
The shopping for this meal wasn't cheap, but it wasn't horrible either, due to two unexpected circumstances. Firstly, the first bottle of milk that I picked up was leaky, so they fetched me another bottle and only charged me for the bottle refund, not the milk itself. Secondly, as we were heading towards checkout, another shopper came up to us and asked if we wanted a coupon for $10 off; it required a purchase of $25 or more and expired that day, and she wasn't buying that much. So we took it, obviously, and that was nice.
The best thing was, of course, seeing Ai Ling again and meeting Kris, because I hadn't seen Ai Ling since May 2002. It would have been ridiculous to have her so close and yet not to see her all summer. They were both lovely guests, gratifyingly impressed by my cooking. I must entertain more often!
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