Dinner with time constraints!

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  Making dinner to serve to guests at my home versus making dinner to bring to a family are two very different things!

This week,  I offered to bring dinner to a couple from church that could really use a break. While I really enjoy doing that sort of thing, surprisingly, I found this rather stressful!

What should I prepare? They said that they were not fussy and had no allergies...so I had a blank slate! Generally, the fallback plan is a casserole dish of some sort, right?  I don’t like casseroles anymore so I decided to make a Sunday meal! Salad, meat, potatoes, vegetables, and dessert. Sounds simple!

Caesar salad- but of course I made homemade croutons with garlic salt and a homemade dressing which has plenty of garlic.

Potatoes- rosemary, garlic oven roasted 

Green beans- green beans almondine... more garlic and lots of almonds and lemon juice.

Meat- marinated grilled pork tenderloin which Arie prepared... more garlic.

Dessert- Elegant cheese squares. An old recipe that my family loves but the crust was a tad over-baked and the filling was a bit softer than normal. It was supposed to be perfect lol!

So much garlic!!  Haha!

They wanted dinner at around 5 pm and ready serve (as hot as possible)!

I was pretty close. We left the house at 4:55 with food packed take-out containers and in a thermal bag! It was hot and ready to eat. I did not mix the Caesar salad just in case they wanted to save that for another meal!

After we left them to enjoy the meal, we went home and enjoyed ours-since I had prepared enough dinner for 4. It was pretty tasty and it really was not overwhelmingly garlic forward!

Once I had decided what to prepare, I thought this would not be very stressful because I had done this all before but for some reason it was a stressful day!

What did I take away from this?? 

1. Do more prep the day before- the croutons, the dressing, the dessert

That would have helped BUT I think managing the time was the worse part. I felt like a contestant on Chopped having to do it all before someone declared “time is up”!

I’m happy it all worked out! 

Now, I wonder when I stopped taking pictures of food??

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