surreal dinner party

I was making a list yesterday for the grocery. What's on sale where. What we need in the house as "staples" (milk, bread, shampoo, laundry starch). What we need for the recipes that i'm going to make for the week.

It was this last part of the list-making that got me thinking.

We, Joe and i, used to have dinner parties, about every month. Usually six people (three couples or a mix of couples and singletons), dinner and dessert at our place on a Saturday night. A mix of people from work and neighborhood and church, parents of our kids' friends, football team parents... As we don't have family here in NM, we kind of make our own "family" for holidays and other weekends.

Making the list for this week's recipes got me thinking of our next dinner party and what we should make and who we should invite. Then i started really looking at the recipes.

I have a recipe for "Sunburst Chocolate Cake" that says in the comments "make for Big Joe next time he comes....chocolate and orange-- his favorite!". I then saw the recipe for "Paul's pie crust" soon followed by "Grandma Amy's English Toffee". That was close to the recipe for "Paul's Favorite Spinach". Not to be outdone, i then had a recipe for "Wolfe Eggs", with the comment "this was developed by Larry Pathe from a comment in a Nero Wolfe book.... and was always a hit at Easter celebrations with the Pathe clan". I then saw the recipe for "Ama's Frickadelen" (a kind of cold hamburger/mini-meatloaf that is yummy for picnics or light sandwich-and-soup dinners).

A whole "dinner party" (five recipe contributors or attributors) of loved ones in our families who have passed in the past twelve years (Ama first, the week after Christian was born, then Larry, Amy, Paul).

Kinda morbid, i guess.

So, instead of having a dinner party of friends and strangers (more on the strangers part in another posting), we're going to try something different this month. No, we cannot have a dinner party of family as they are all snowed in way out in Ohio/Indiana and cannot come here.

No, we're going to have a pseudo-family dinner. And serve favorite recipes of family members all month. We're starting with the "Paul's Favorite Spinach" recipe tonight and should finish the month with the Sunburst Chocolate Cake (Big Joe, aka Pop-pops). If we cannot get the others of our families here in NM for dinner, we'll just dine on "family dishes" and pretend. We can share the family stories with our kids and help them to feel a part of a bigger family.

I'll attach the recipes when we make them. Then you can try them too.