New Friends and Goat Cheese

Several weeks ago, I made a new friend!  Turns out, we both enjoy cooking, so we planned a night to cook dinner for our hubbies.  She even made me a cute new apron!  Thanks, Claire. :)

Dinner was baked chicken with homemade tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, sweet potatoes with goat cheese (amazing!), and a pretty fruit salad.  Simple yet very filling.

It was sunny. :)

Oh, and I almost forgot!  I made homemade shortcake for our tasty Strawberry Shortcake dessert.  Here's the easy recipe:

Ingredients:

2 c. flour

2 tbsp. sugar

4 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. cream of tartar

1/2 c. butter, softened

1 egg, beaten

2/3 c. milk

Directions:

In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cream of tartar.  Cut in butter until mixture is the size of peas.  Add the egg and milk; mix well.  Spread into a greased 8-in. square baking pan.  Bake at 375 for 20-25 minutes.  Cut into squares and top with strawberries and whipped cream if desired. Yield: 9 servings.

Easter Dinner

The menu:
    Chicken Fried Chicken

    Mashed Potatoes with Country-Style Gravy

    Mom’s Sweet Carrots

    Kiwi, Mango, and Watermelon (brought by Alyssa & Leanne)

Before church, I peeled and cut the carrots, peeled and boiled the potatoes, and prepared the coating for the chicken (see baggie of crumbs).  For the coating, I added crushed saltines, flour, seasoned salt, salt, and pepper.  You can add potato flakes if you don’t live in a place where you can’t find fancy things like that.

So yeah, Mike won so many of these random packets of things for the White Elephant party last December, so I had this gravy and, wow, was it yummy.

 I forgot to take any more pictures, surprise.  Our 2 Canadian friends came over after a very long strange Easter church service, and we had a nice little dinner.

And here we are in our Easter garb:

Late Sunday Lunch

My favorite day to have people over is Saturday.  Saturday lunch, to be more specific.  That way I have all morning to prepare it!

We have been trying to have Brian & Jill (and, of course, their adorable children) over for almost a year now, but either Brian or Mike were always out of town or we wanted to have people over that were about to move away or other reasons…Well, I invited them for Saturday (yesterday), but later they needed to switch to Sunday.  “Okay, I said, but our church gets out way later than yours so we’ll need to eat around 2 at the earliest.”  Cool, no problem.

Anywho…I prepared most of the food last night so it’d be ready to throw in the oven.  I soaked beans all day, boiled them all evening (literally), cut and chopped a dozen different things, etc.

Here’s everything I served:

·         Black bean dip with chips

·         Mom’s Chicken Enchiladas, extremely modified by me

·         Yogurt fruit salad (with green grapes that I haven’t seen here EVER until this week!! So yummy!!)

·         Green salad with a couple dressing options *

* This was seriously the second time I ever bought lettuce here.  You have to wash vegetables so well here and I’m just paranoid about lettuce.

So, to continue my story above…let me just explain that Jill is a phenomenal cook.  She’s a stay-at-home mom and has really perfected cooking.  Every time I have anything she made, it’s fantastic.  Needless to say, that made me a little nervous.  I’m new at this!  She’s also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I knew I shouldn’t worry, but I did anyway.  Of course, in all my worries I forgot that I was supposed to call them when we got out of church so they’d know when to come over.  All this time, I thought we just decided on 2:00.  Was definitely MY fault…but the delay helped me calm down and get things done as I was running behind.

Alas, everything ended up perfectly, they complimented it many times, and everyone was stuffed.  We didn’t even eat leftover birthday cake/ice cream, because no one had room!

To top it all off, I was internally beaming at Jill’s comment when she first arrived…She’s been excited to finally taste the cooking she’s heard so much about from different people.  Wow!  That made my day.