The weekend temperatures fluctuated as greatly as our plans. Our maybe that’s backwards – maybe our plans fluctuated as greatly as the weather. In either case things changed quickly. We started the weekend with no plans. I thought I’d keep working on weeding and chores. My brother-in-law suggested that the 4 of us “do something”, maybe a bbq. I said great. Then I remembered we’d talked about taking the Circle Line cruise around NYC. A perfect weekend to do that! Friday night around dinner time I booked us 4 tickets for Sunday. Saturday morning my sister emailed me to say that my brother-in-law had test positive for Covid that morning. Sigh. Because she mentioned getting someone to use their tickets, I never checked for a refund.
I thought it would be fun to have our friends Pam and Jerry go out with us. They like “doing things” and they were a week-recovered from covid. As they do not answer their phone or email on Shabbos, it’s not always easy to reach them. I drove over to their house and checked with Pam. They couldn’t go Sunday but they were available that night. Yes! Come for drinks & snacks on the deck. I kept trying to find someone to use the other 2 tickets. My friend Amy could use 1 but her son Joe didn’t want to sail. It finally occurred to me that maybe I could get a refund or reschedule. Yes, indeed both of those are possibilities. So while texting Amy I handled the refund request. I invited Amy & Joe for dinner on the deck on Sunday. 🙂
Well, Saturday night was clear and COLD. Cold is, of course, a relative term. Given the 90+ degrees and humidity we’ve been having, Saturday night was in the low 70s in the early evening and not humid. I had on long pants, as did Pam and Jerry. We had the firepit going and NOT the fans. It was cool and quiet and pleasant. Sunday morning dawned much the same. But by the time Amy & Joe came at 5pm, it was near 90, disgustingly humid, and I had THREE fans going on the deck to keep air moving. We were doing okay until the skies opened up and RAIN started around 7pm. We’ve been in a drought, remember???? I have no inside for entertaining – my dining room is set up as a major computer lab. But I have a front porch! We relocated to the porch, I set up 2 fans there, and we had our dessert. There was no rain yesterday during the day but it started again at night and is expected to continue today and tomorrow. Within 24 hours we swung from Autumn back to Summer, from drought to rainy season. 🙂
Normally this is the kind of thing in the past that would have had me calling the police hysterically demanding that the car be towed but I’ve mellowed a lot over the years. I wasn’t thrilled, because I was hoping to use my driveway for parking guests’ cars, but I wasn’t as freaked out as I might have been because my husband’s car was at the curb and driveable. But still – a bad omen or something getting rid of any last bad karma by having an inconvenience that wasn’t a show-stopper? I decided to consider it a clearing.
more major request of my staff, um, I mean my family. I told them that I wanted the house to look as if I simply waved my magic wand and all the food appeared. The guest of honor at this party was the renovated kitchen, and NOTHING could be out to mar the look and beauty of the counters, cabinets, floor, and appliances. That is a big ask when you consider my menu and the work involved.
My sister went to dislodge her. Now you need to know that for 16+ years my sister has attempted to make nice to WC and for 16+ years WC laughs in my sister’s face and runs away. We all figured this was a piece of cake – my sister would walk in there and look at WC and talk to her and WC would take off, as she has done REPEATEDLY in the past. It didn’t happen that way. WC simply glared and did not move. We must have gone through this routine 3 times and each time I said, fine, leave her be, we still have time. We ran out of time. WC finally headed up the stairs when the first guests arrived. I threw my big, grand, celebration party with white cat fur matted all-over the back of my red couch. I didn’t mention it and neither did the folks watching TV. But other than that, I think the house looked great and the party was quite a success.
Food preparation was going to take 4 days – Saturday through Tuesday. I do have two refrigerators, and the new one is HUGE, but even so – I had a LOT of food to store both before preparation and after. Where does all that food fit?
I wasn’t too worried about the falcon returning nor the roving gangs of deer, but we also have raccoons (known for their dexterity with locked receptacles), ground hogs, squirrels, skunks and cats. It would take a little thought and prevention to use the deck.
He took a look at the 
It looks so EASY but it is incredibly time consuming. This is where my sister was beyond compare. She sat there at my dining room table slicing and arranging all the crudite. She took home the skewers, the cheese, the basil, the dressing, and the tomatoes and skewered food all through the football game (had her team WON, I’d be putting in a mention of that. But alas, neither of us had winning bowl games this year. 😦 ). Not only did she do all of that labor-intensive work on Monday, she came early Tuesday to help assemble the asian salad cups and other dishes. 
Monday was the night I had to utilize the deck for more cold storage. We’d cooked the turkey on Monday so that we could slice it on Tuesday. The wonton cups were made. The cookies I was baking were made (salted tahini chocolate chip cookies). The fruit skewers were done. The crudite cups were assembled. I got out one of my plastic storage bins from the renovation – used to pack up our lives for 6 months 🙂 – and began creating layers within the bin. I made sure to lash down and protect the bin from raccoons once I put it outside. 
I did come home and did a bit more preparation – baking the shortbread cookies and rolling out the quiche dough. I was still awake at midnight to hear the fireworks across the river. The sky was completely overcast so all I could see were the clouds lit by the explosions. Somewhere around 1 am I made it to bed although I make no claims about actually falling asleep. 🙂 My brain was still churning and my bad leg joints had begun to complain. Ah yes, running full throttle!
Along with a few other folk, we’d get together at my house for dinner and watch the ball drop. Then a few years ago some of us began murmuring about being too tired to stay up til midnight. I remember one year where I think 3 of the females were actually asleep on couches and chairs after dinner – we had to wake them before midnight. *grin* NOT ME. But you knew that. A few years ago I made an “executive decision” – I moved our get-together to New Year’s Day, called it Brunch/Lunch and invited a few more people. It was still a relatively small crowd and we did still have New Year’s Eve with a small handful of folk (who could stay awake, or at least attempted to make it to midnight). 
Once I drew up the invitation list, I saw I had around 60 people on the list. I’ve posted pictures of the inside of my house and you should know that it would be an extremely tight squeeze to fit 60 people on my first floor without removing furniture – even WITH removing furniture. I think the only time I’ve hosted that many simultaneously was for my son’s 
And that would be just for having the bridge club over to play bridge (12 people there for a specific purpose eating only munchies, coffee & dessert), long before this day and age when everyone has some food preference and/or allergy. So I make my list: gluten-free, diabetic, kosher, vegetarian, no alcohol, following the keto diet, on a lose-weight diet. Apparently I also have someone who does not eat nightshade but I didn’t know that until she was there and checking ingredients. Once I have the food restrictions, I begin on my menu. There must be enough food that all of those people will have a CHOICE of something to eat. I don’t want to have a pile of carrot sticks to hand out and say “here – you can eat this”. 🙂 (Do carrots have nightshade??? Something new to learn and consider.)
Paring the menu down to the selected dishes is the next step. The dish has to fit the mood, fit my loose kashrut standards (no pork, no shellfish, no mixing meat & dairy in one dish) and be tasty. For this party I decided that other than my main courses (turkey, quiche, bagels/lox/cream cheese), all the other dishes had to be new and different – NOT like my other party menus. 🙂 And that meant – turn to the internet and browse!!!
We are both amazed and delighted each and every time we are in the kitchen. I’m not sure but I think the sink might actually be the best single improvement in the room.
When I work there at the counter the stove is just to my right, easy reach to go from cutting board to pot. 
My husband and I were able to do that dinner without any bumping into each other, or needing to time counter space or any other “right of way” issues. It was great. I made bread (from scratch, no bread machine), Turkish coffee brownies, salad, yogurt pie, and roasted broccoli & cauliflower. My husband did his wonderful hand-made pasta, and a tagine chicken dish that is sensational. I also had time to make all the accoutrements for the cocktails: allspice dram and a cranberry syrup. It was all so much fun!!!!! The leftovers are pretty yummy also. 🙂
Last night we threw our last party with our old kitchen. It was Memorial Day weekend, always a great time to throw a BBQ. We had several reasons, however, to throw a party. Our wonderful next-door neighbors are moving down (back) to Florida. They will be gone by mid-June. All of us in the neighborhood are heart-broken that they are leaving. We love them, we’ve had such good times together, it was a wonderful, wonderful relationship. I decided that we needed to do a good, fun send-off to remind them how much they like us all and that they would need to come back and visit. (I already have a promise of a return for our Passover seder. 🙂 ) When I first proposed the Bye-bye BBQ I thought that we’d have already lost our kitchen – that we’d be doing this kitchen-free. I’m very happy that we still had a kitchen to do food preparation.
That was the second “last hurrah” – bye-bye to the kitchen. For 34 years we’ve been entertaining, throwing parties, feeding people all from this kitchen and breakfast room. Okay – I’m exaggerating. The breakfast room and deck are only 28 years old. Putting that addition on the house was a true life changer. When we do BBQs, drinks and appetizers are out on the deck and the dinner selections are in the breakfast room. I probably should have taken some pictures of that last night – we had a MOUNTAIN of ribs. 🙂 And LOTS of non-meat sides because we have a fair number of vegetarians in our gathering. 
Yet another reason for the BBQ was my brother-in-law’s birthday. He, like our guests of honor neighbors, is carnivorous so we decided on beef ribs. My sister has a membership in a fantastic warehouse called “Restaurant Depot”. It has every and anything a restaurant/food vendor would want/need. My brother-in-law and I went there on Friday to get the ribs. It’s probably not a good idea to let the 2 of us do this sort of adventure without a chaperone because we both believe that more food is better. No – more than more. We came home with about 30 pounds of beef ribs. But that’s fine, because in 3 days, we’re not going to have a kitchen, no stove, and we’re going to still need to eat. Leftovers!!!! I know some people HATE leftovers but I love them. Leftovers mean I don’t have to cook or prepare something. My husband is the real chef in the family (I bake) and he did a great dry rub on the ribs. For good measure we tossed in some chicken dogs and veggie burgers. 
We had sugar free cheesecake and sugar free pound cake with fresh fruit and whipped cream for those needing SF, and we had sugar full cheesecake and sugar full ice cream cake for those wanting that good old sugar hit. The appetizers were delicious also. I’ll also give a little mention to the fact that I nearly lost my husband last night. As in permanently. One of my guests brought a home-made keto dessert (she’s very big on all sorts of healthy diets) and I’m not really sure what these things were, but they were sugar free. So she gave 2 to my husband who, of course, ate them. I only found out after the fact when I heard her describing the ingredients which included macadamia nuts. I said – don’t give any to him because he is highly allergic to macadamia nuts. Which is when I heard he’d already eaten them. Everyone joked about it and teased him and her, but the truth is – he was somewhat sick from them last night. 2 little tiny doses but enough for him to have a reaction. 
Eighteen of us on the deck – chairs and space enough for everyone, although I will admit there was a tight squeeze in one corner. I had the chance to show everyone the plans for the renovation, and got to show off the now-famous upstairs hall door (you remember – an essential piece for 
Today, however, is designated as “pack up the kitchen and breakfast room day”. Tomorrow is probably the same thing. We are working out a plan for how/when to move cat paraphernalia upstairs in preparation for The Great Incarceration. We are trying to determine in advance where we will put all the boxed up kitchen ‘stuff’. We have a lot of stuff. Where did all this stuff come from? Do we NEED all this stuff????
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