My friends Pam and John are thoughtful enough to rent a beautiful country house in the summers just perfect for entertaining their friends. This past weekend, we packed up the little Gateaux and met them and their kids up there, along with our mutual awesome friend Meg. It was nearly a reunion of our Jamaica trip, and to make it even more so, the weekend specialty cocktail was the Dark & Stormy. Even Mr. Gateau put several away, and he's not usually one who's big on spirits OR sweet mixers.
We ate well, and we ate a lot of meat. At lunch on Saturday we had lots of delicious composed salads from a good takeout place, and a portion of the quesadilla of the day, which happened to be a meatloaf quesadilla. Those who ate it said it worked much better than expected. Oh, and drank a bottle of rose with that.
For dinner, John hauled out a motherlode of grass-fed, thick rib eye steaks. Those were grilled and served up with grilled vegetables and roasted potato wedges, and we drank a few bottles of red wine and capped it all off with flourless chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream.
On Sunday, Mr. Gateau cooked up a massive breakfast of challah french toast, which we served with mixed berries and three, yes three, different types of breakfast meats. We had two full packages of thick-sliced applewood smoked bacon, pork breakfast sausages, and chicken breakfast sausages. I thought this was overkill and almost put the second package of bacon away, but Mr. Gateau was thinking ahead, and insisted I make it all, and damned if we didn't put away all but about three slices.
Then we rolled home, but before that we got ice cream at a wonderful roadside stand. The children were basically covered head to toe in sticky drippings, which is just about the best way to end a summer weekend.
