Mother's Day Dinner

I'm not sure if this counts as me cooking since I only supervised, but here it is. For Mother's Day we had Emily, Scott, Emily's parents, Doug and Dianne, And Emily's sisters, Kris, Allison, and Rachel all over for dinner. Add Matt, Sarah and I and we had 10 people. Matt and Scott did our main course. They made a crockpot apricot chicken. I found and modified the recipe, then sat in the kitchen and gave them the instructions. I also tried to teach Scott how to dice an onion, but he was scared by my tremor and just did it his way. Matt measured the spices while Scott chopped sweet potatoes. He now hates chopping sweet potatoes. Quite a few of them flew around the kitchen. They also followed my advice to prep the crockpots Saturday night since there would likely not be time before church. They were such obedient budding sous chefs. Obviously Emily and I need to give them more practice. On Sunday Matt made a salad and the Ellsworths brought green beans and bran muffins. All very good!

Roast Beef Sandwiches

While Emily and Scott were here I made roast beef sandwiches that were pretty good. The recipe says to roast the beef at 500* for 25 minutes for medium rare. Matt likes his meat closer to medium well and I like mine medium rare so I figured I'd do 30 minutes and split the difference. The first few slices were beautiful but the we got to the thicker part of the meat and it wasn't just rare, but raw. We went out to eat. When we got home I stuck the roast in the crock pot overnight and went to bed. I don't remember why, but when we got up Matt put it in the refrigerator for me. When dinner time rolled around and I felt like I had enough energy after dialysis, I reheated the roast in its juices. I split French bread, spread it with truffle butter, and put the beef on top of the butter. The recipe indicates that the warm meat will melt the butter, and with the roast plus extra juice, the butter melted nicely. The provolone cheese I put on top of the meat got a bit melty also. All that was needed was some greens and I have some baby mixed greens. I believe this was a success. I was a bit disappointed that I didn't get my medium rare roast beef, but it was still very yummy. Sarah had to take two sittings to finish her portion, as did I, and Scott said they were surprisingly filling. They did look smaller that the average 6 inch Subway, so I expected the boys to have seconds, but the extras had to be eaten later. Days later, not just an hour or so later. My favorite moment was when Emily was eating her second sandwich several days later and was very surprised at how simple they were. I have to agree, they were simple, even if I had to add extra steps so we didn't eat raw meat. Is this a lesson for the future?

I haven't made much beyond soup, sandwiches, pasta, and hotdogs. This past couple of weeks has been insane, so more of our meals are one-pot/10-minute-tops wonders. I've been trying to be good about using ingredients that don't have too much potassium or phosphates, but that means cutting back on my milk consumption. Boo!