Another Opportunity to Cook for Friends

We invited our neighbors, John and Charlene Wasilczyk, to dinner Friday night -- a cool, crisp evening with the promise of rain -- perfect for an oven meal! I had already removed the backbone from a chicken, pressed it flat and put it in a roasting pan in a 400 degree oven. The kitchen was already smelling pretty good when I cut red potatoes and a winter squash into pieces and tossed them with salt, pepper and my favorite, Lemon Olive Oil from Pasolivo.

The chicken was seasoned with a little salt and one of the Mrs. Dash seasoning blends and had been in the oven for about 20 minutes when I took out the roasting pan and added the potatoes and squash. They then roasted together for approximately 45 more minutes; I took them out and stirred the vegetables a couple of times so they would brown evenly.



Dessert was "in the box" as I had gone to Double "D" Cupcakes that afternoon and bought eight -- I wonder why there are only six in the box......it couldn't be that Dan and I each had one the minute we got home, could it?



Here's a close-up -- triple chocolate on the left, red velvet in the center and white with fresh strawberries on the right.



See how yummy -- just can't resist them! Fortunately, we were able to twist John and Charlene's arms so that they took the final two home with them!   (See my post on those famous cupcakes HERE!!)

Carved chicken on th table, minus a few parts that we just had moved to our plates...



The vegetables, again the picture was taken after serving ourselves -- we were hungry! And actually we shouldn't have been -- we had already tried two kinds of cheese with two different bottles of wines and an assortment of crackers. We also served the wines with dinner; they were both from Justin Vineyards in Paso Robles CA. The white was a Viognier, the red a Tempranillo. Both were great with the cheeses and with the food.

We also had a green vegetable blend from Trader Joes -- they call it a green blend, but it also contains cauliflower along with green beans and some other green veggies all in a creamy garlic sauce.

After dinner, we took our coffee into the family room to watch one of the few remaining days of the Olympics. We didn't agree with the referee that Apolo Ohno deserved to be DQ'd in that race, what did you think?