Dinner's Ready!

I have not moved the blog yet - and I may not if I can figure out how to get around the no picture thing. We had our neighbors over for dinner last night - we've been trying for a month but either they're busy or we are. But we found a weekend we could get together so yesterday was the day. We cleaned the house, put the extra chairs in the basement - I have no idea WHY we have never done this before - why we have seven chairs jammed in our little kitchen all the time. Probably because we have them. Anyhoo - I made lasagna which if you're my age is The Company Dinner. Why? Well, because it's perfect - you can do meat, no meat - it can be made ahead of time so when the guests arrive you're not frantically chopping and stirring. I made it in a dutch oven, my stepbrothers have been facebooking their results back and forth so I decided since I'd just bought a beautiful red Dutch Oven that was the way to go. I used my smaller one for the vegetarian version, the new monster one for the full on sausage version. I made it first thing in the morning, as I was stirring the scent was a little....off. I remembered we'd had a power outage and the date was a bit more then I had thought it was - David ended up running to the supermarket, better safe then sorry. And it's not a good idea to to play Russian Roulette with the company. Good fences make good neighbors but not dishing out the food poisoning does a better job. I made the sauce from scratch, tons of cheese, the dutch oven stacked it high - everything in the fridge til dinner. We did cheese and crackers for starters, another thing my generation understands. It was two kinds of cheese - one white one yellow on square crackers. We had plenty of wine, I had two chilling in the fridge - Jim brought white and red. They got the grand tour, Robin grew up next door so she was pretty taken with the upstairs, especially since she knows what it did look like. We sat down to start in the living room, Reuben was beside himself, especially when the cheese plate came around - it was hard to convince he was not supposed to be competing for it. All he knew was I had a big plate of cheese and he needed to get in there for his half! Arrgh! Back to school Reuben, back to school. I made sure everyone admired our $75 dollar chair and table set, yes we are still proud of that. I served a little salad just so we could say we did and then the lasagna and garlic bread. It came really really good- I was even a little surprised at how much more evenly it cooked and nothing dried out. We had so much fun - these are two of the people we wish we saw more of. After dinner was coffee, pie, baklava and they left around ten. Reuben did very well - I'm walking him again next weekend with Charlene to continue socializing him. And today I am doing nothing more or less. I cleaned out the dresser in the guest room since Adam will be moving here in the next week or so, but other wise not too much to do. We cleaned the house yesterday and the wash is done. Ahh.