Hosted first big dinner of the summer season last night. Three sets of cousins from MI, VA and CA, plus their 97 and 93 year old Moms who are Bob's Aunts from AZ and MI. Kind of a crowd for this tiny summer house but as I told them several times, this is exactly why I bought that big table and really, we LIKE doing this. But to make a little more room in the kitchen, outsourced the cooking to the spouse who is still enamoured of his new propane grill (yes, the one that took 3 and 1/2 hours to assemble). Nothing super special but I think we wowed them anyway. My old fail proof family recipe for grilled chicken is simply to baste while cooking with a concotion of just butter, worcestershire sauce, garlic salt and lemon juice, applied generously. These were rather small little fryers from the Petoskey Tannery Creek meat market - but I'm guessing they were raised locally as the flavor was too good (and too expensive) to have been raised in a large scale production facility.
As I am conscious of eating locally as much as possible, was happy to announce to all that we were eating Michigan grown asparagus (MI is third largest asparagus producer in the nation - who knew?). And new potatoes although not local as I didn't make it to the farm market to see if although still early, there might have been any available yet. And for dessert, there was really yummy old style cobbler made from Friske Orchard cherries (in Charlevoix) and wild rhubarb from the vacant lot across the road where we make our big garden. Oh...and of course, home made vanilla ice cream. They were all groaning by the end of the meal, a good sign I think.
And it doesn't get much better than this.
