Monday Night Dinner

I find that I genuinely have nothing much to say this week about Dinner or food. Here are some unrelated things I’ve been cogitating about this week.

Apartment Therapy – one of the many (many) food blogs I read regularly – is running with an ‘easy entertaining’ theme this week. I read their post on ten tips for entertaining and found myself nodding along with about half of them as commonsense put down in print, and tilting my head and shrugging at the other half as theoretically sound advice that I never put into practice.

This is to say – yes, anything that can be made in advance is your friend (Tip #2). There’s a reason Dinner involves a lot of soups, stews and braises – they can be made the night before, and actually improve for sitting around in your fridge overnight.

And, while theoretically I agree that you probably shouldn’t chose the night you’re going to be serving 10 people as the night to start experimenting in the kitchen (Tip #1), in practice this is exactly what I do because when else would I have an excuse to make an Indonesian beef curry that takes 3 hours and 20 ingredients? Although, arguably Dinner is not a dinner party at this point and is just family and one is always at liberty to experiment on family because they’re required to love you even if it doesn’t turn out exactly as anticipated.

Also, their Tip #9 about ‘don’t do dinner, do an afternoon tea or a wine tasting because it’s easier’ bears no resemblance to the way I would approach an afternoon tea or wine tasting menu. I can guarantee both of those events would require more work, and more work on fiddly small things, than making dinner for 8 people (well, maybe not this week’s dinner which had a lot of component parts).

In other news, it’s almost Mother’s Day (in the US at least, depending on where you live in Europe you’ve either already missed it by a solid month, or have another few weeks to come up with something inventive), and the internet is full of helpful suggestions for things you should or shouldn’t do. Yahoo recommends not getting your mother kitchen equipment or a scale. I’ll go out on a limb and say there is almost no event at which giving a woman a scale would go over well. The kitchen goods I’m more ambivalent about, and not just because that’s what I gave my mother this year (completely useless, highly decorative kitchen equipment). I think as long as your mother enjoys cooking and will appreciate whatever it is you’re giving her, go for it. Then again, I’m the girl who gets excited about being given casserole pans, so take that advice with a grain of salt.

Nicholas Kristoff has a much more earnest, socially responsible suggestion for a Mother’s Day gift – giving money to a charity that supports medical care for women in places where that’s not readily available. This is both highly appropriate, and yet manages to also seem slightly morbid. That being said, I have in the past given my parents donations to charities relevant to their interests for Mother’s/Father’s Day – ALA for my mother, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites for my father. So, it comes down to knowing your audience.

Curried Chicken Salad
Ham Biscuits
Hard Boiled Eggs
Apple-Fennel Slaw
Tomatoes
Fruit
Radishes

Curried Chicken Salad

Recipe previously given: Farewell to Summer Dinner

Ham Biscuits
You know it’s been too long since you last made biscuits when you can’t remember how many times you usually multiply the recipe to feed Dinner. For the record (for future me), double the recipe for 8 people.

Recipe previously given: Farewell to Summer Dinner

Hard Boiled Eggs

Apple-Fennel Slaw

Recipe previously given: Ant Parade

Tomatoes
I have no idea where these are from, but miraculously they actually tasted like tomatoes. I was so shocked I bought three packages of them.

Fruit
A plate full of all kinds of things that never grow in Massachusetts – pineapple, kiwis, grapes, mineola oranges. How long until strawberry season starts here?