August 22

I'm a little slow at writing this post.

On August 22, family came over to visit for lunch.  Some relatives were still in town from my cousin's wedding. My aunt hadn't seen my house and every time she is visiting from Michigan, I ask when she's going to visit.  This time we planned it out that she would visit.

We actually didn't know if it would be Friday or Sunday before she left Michigan, but at least I had that much figured out.

On Friday at a picnic, I decided to invite my Great Aunt and Uncle. Then I thought perhaps we need food.  I'm at a picnic until late Friday. Then Saturday is the wedding. Then Sunday people come over.  I'm not sure how I can pull this off. 

Friday night we decided we would cook. 

A week or so earlier my Aunt told me not to clean but then my mom keeps telling me that I need to clean. Then I felt pressured to clean, but I did not. I did clean off the kitchen table since we might need to eat off of it.

Saturday morning I went to McGuinnis Sisters to buy food for our gathering.
Saturday night after the wedding, we stopped at Giant Eagle to get some more appetizers.

Poly knew we were going to eat in the dining room so she decided to be the center of attention.

Cutting the potatoes

2 pans for 5 lbs of potatoes

the crackers and pepperoni tray

The steaks after they were seasoned

I took a few pictures while cooking. Then we ate almost all the food and I took one picture. I didn't take any pictures of the family or any pictures of the appetizers displayed or of all the food around our table.

The menu:
Appetizers:
veggetables and dip

bruschetta on these awesome cracker/bread things 

crackers, cheese, and pepperoni

Lunch:

Delmontico steak - cooked then sliced so everyone could take slices.

Roasted red potatoes (2 pans. 1 made with some extra spicy seasonings and 1 normal)

Steamed green beans with butter

corn on the cob

bread

The only leftovers

Dessert:
Banana Cream Pie

Peanut Butter Cookies

Everyone arrived at the same time because everyone met my dad and they followed each other from Monroeville to here.  

My dining room table has 8 chairs. There were 10 of us.  I decided to move 2 chairs from the kitchen to the dining room and squeeze in. It was nice.  It's great to have everyone sitting at the same table.  Poly even sat underneath the table right by my uncle's feet. She is just like a dog.

All the food turned out great. I do the same thing for the roasted potatoes all the time but they always taste different. Sometimes they are awesome and sometimes not. I can't figure out why. 

It was the first time we cooked more than 1 steak. It was the first time we cooked steak and were going to slice it to serve it. We just learned 2 days earlier while watching Master Chef that you can do that. They did it to serve the Army.   It was the first time we ever made corn on the cob on the grill.  All these first times of all this stuff had me scared. If we ruined anything, we would not have enough food. 

Good thing Dave was attempting to make rare steak for my brother because he went out at the time it should be for rare and it was medium or maybe medium well. Time to hurry and get that off the grill. We got lucky there. 

I cooked 5 lbs of red potatoes. We made 12 ears of corn. I made more green beans than ever before. We made $45 worth of steak. We had 12 cookies and 1 pie plus the appetizers that almost got entirely eaten. 

Everything was eaten except 2 ears of corn.  I actually took less steak than I wanted because I feared we would run out of food.  In addition to cooking all those foods we had never cooked before, it was also the first time we cooked for 10 people. 

We only ended up taking pictures of Poly while everyone was here.  Poly is like a dog. She wants petted. She also took turns getting different people to pet her.

We showed my Picasa images from the wedding on the TV and talked about them.  We did it as a slideshow and it seemed to take forever.  Then I mentioned they hadn't seen my wedding pictures in awhile (or ever) and why should everyone just see Jason's so we opened a few of mine. It was boring some people so we didn't go through all 1000. Plus my aunt and cousin didn't even make it down to my wedding.

At one point we started talking about the hornets nests we had removed. Timmy goes outside to check it out and his first step outside, he gets stung.  He did go back outside and take nice pictures of the hornets

The relatives that had to drive way back home, left around 3. My parents and brothers stayed until 5.  I was shocked my great aunt and uncle stayed so long. Uncle Henry is 80 and my house was an hour out of his way to going back to Maryland. My house was an hour into my aunt and cousin's trip so my aunt was excited about that. 

When Uncle Henry got home, he called my cell to tell me he made it. I didn't have my cell with me so I missed the call. He left a message. He sounded like he was almost in tears. He was telling me how great it was that we had them over. They loved that they were included. They felt like kings eating our good food. He really wanted to thank me.  It was probably one of the nicest voice mails I ever got.