Friends Over

Well the other Tuesday, I invited Jennifer and Reid and Steven over for dinner and cards. I moved all my furniture around to create a dining room from what had been my living room. I've been excited to have someone over to see the changes and to enjoy the possibilities of actually having a dining room again. It's all put a big ball in motion, and now I want to move the kitchen around and add a dish washer and repaint all the cabintry and replace all the hinges and door pulls and make it all look about a million times better than it now does.

So the dinner was meant to be really simple, and I set myself the task of not having to go grocery shopping. I decided I was only allowed to prepare food from what was at hand already. I mixed up a little martini and sat down in the easy chair in the corner of the kitchen and had a flip through some of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazines. I shuffled around and found the one from last Dec/Jan. I figured it couldn't hurt to be seasonal about my looking, even if it was an "everyday" meal.

I landed on Lemon Butter Fillets of Sole, which sounded really easy and yummy. Check on all the ingredients and switch the sole to tilapia. Then towards the back, I found a recipe for polenta. That was a good idea since it was a change from rice, and Steven was coming over, so I could ask him to babysit it for me while I took care of other cooking chores. Then I had some collard greens and caramelized onions, and done. I'd pulled my menu together. When I opened the freezer to take out the tilapia fillets, I found a bag each of frozen peaches and raspberries. "Great," I thought, "that takes care of dessert." Peach/berry crisps in little individual sized ramekins.

So I had a little swig and set to work. The recipe for the fish had you do this fancy thing where you roll up the fillet into a little log for the fancy part, which I did, but I had to stab them through with a tooth pick to keep them in place. While I'm on the subject of this fish, I just remebered that I cheated. I had to go out for some dry white wine, and indeed that's what I was drinking at this point, not a little martini. Any way, I followed all the instructions, got it all ready to go in the pot, with only to turn the heat on and cook for a few minutes, then finish off the sauce.

Everyone arrived, and I broke off the cooking to make everyone a Negroni, and we all sat down in the dining room to enjoy them together. Conversation turned to our idea about starting a food club. Reid, having been a frat guy in college was brimming with ideas about how to run it, and what mean tricks would have to be played on the pledges to our society. It was all fun and games, but I was having a hard time focusing because my head was already in the kitchen. So after I finished my coctail, that's where I headed, and I carried on with my part of the conversation being shouted from one room to the other.

Then I couldn't find the damn magazine, so I wasn't going to be able to have Steven make the polenta. I sort of had a little nervous breakdown; but, I gathered myself up and thanks to some looking help from Jennifer, I managed to find the magazine which had slid down behind the toaster oven. Onward. Steven started the polenta exactly following the proportions laid out by the magazine recipe. I have to say that when I'd read through it, it seemed like 4 cups of water to 3/4 cup of corn meal sounded really out of control, but not having made it in ages, we soldiered on with the recipe as written.

This turned out to be a mistake. I found the polenta too runny. It was more like grits I guess. All poridge and runny. Anyway. The fish finished right at the perfect moment. I plated it all up with two scoops of polenta on the bottom of a small orange plate, then a small pile of collards and onions, then two fish rolls on top, topped with a couple spoonfuls of the lemon butter sauce. It was very simple, very pretty. It was also kind of gross. The fish hadn't cooked thoroughly through for one of Jennifer's fillets, and then the sauce wasn't balanced right. The polenta gravy goo tasted alright, but was just plain runny for my liking. The best part of the meal was the collards, but there was only enough for one serving each, and I'd've loved to have more of them. Anyway, it felt like a bit of a disappointing diner. Everyone was gracious. The dessert was really good, and we all enjoyed the wine Reid and Jennifer had brought. And the cards were fun too, even though Reid won.

I give the evening an A- and the meal a C+. I'm not going to bother to post the recipes cuz the food wasn't that good. I had thought I wouldn't even write about this meal, but then Paul dared me to write about polenta goo, and I realized it wouldn't be altogether fair to edit out my personal disappointments with cooking. So here you are, I sometimes suck in the kitchen, I even get disappointed at times, but I still really love it.