"How about dinner on Saturday," he asks me, "we'll cook for some friends."
Okay, I think, a joint family effort in cooking dinner. Should be fun.
"Okay," he says, "can I leave you in charge of it?"
How's that again?
In any case, almost everything was prepared while he was out playing golf. Sister, as usual, was in charge of decorating the table, the salad and dessert. I would take care of the soup and the main course, which my father would ostensibly help me with. My mother had the most important job of all: buying the groceries in the morning and generally not getting involved in the cooking.
Dinner went quite well, even if there were some slight blood-thinning surprises along the way. At 4pm I decide to take out the steaks from the refrigerator to marinate, only to discover some were still blocks of ice. Apparently having removed them from the freezer into the fridge a full 18 hours ago was not a sufficient amount of time for them to thaw.
8.45pm, time to cook the steaks. Get the clarified butter out...where's the clarified butter? Not in the big fridge, not in the small one, where the blazes is my butter!
"Oh, I might have used some when my friend and I were trying to make hollandaise sauce," my sister volunteers. Some? I had a tub with 220g of clarified butter - who uses 220g of butter to make hollandaise sauce! What's worse, the hollandaise sauce didn't even turn out right, so my butter was wasted!
But hiccups aside, it was a good dinner.
Sister set the tone with a very pretty table decoration:
Looked a bit like we were getting ready for a May Day fertility ritual, but the guests liked it.
On the menu:
Mesclun salad with strawberries, avocado and edamame. Forgot to take a photo of this one, so you'll just have to imagine it.
Mushroom soup flavoured with Porcini oil
Pan-roasted rib-eye steak with Sauce Bordelaise, spinach, carrots and mashed potatoes.
Chocolate souffle served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream
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