Down Home Cookin'

Ahhhh, entertaining. Sean and I have really been missing entertaining. There is just something about our current house that makes it seem difficult. Part of it is probably missing our favorite piece of furniture that housed all our serving pieces which is collecting dust in storage. Part of it is that we have our landlady and the three legged cat downstairs. I will refrain from commenting further on that. Part of it is being up on a second floor. Part of it is our horrible kitchen. Bottom line, it is just NOT our house. There are lots of random reasons...or, maybe they are excuses. We also needed to add a newborn to the complication column.

We first invited the Sean's classmates from the Irish Studies program over. We had a very fun night, albeit, it was a lot easier and more fun to get ready for it considering I am 'retired' for the time being and Sean had completed everything due for the semester. We had a lovely evening, despite feeling quite old when one of the girls said "this is the classiest party I have been to without my parents!". It was cute.

Okay...onto entertaining round 2.
Time for some good ol' Southern cookin'.

We had been craving Southern cooking since visiting a highly recommended upscale Southern restaurant in Cambridge - Hungry Mother. We had six friends over for a southern feast. The night was guaranteed to be fun just because of the wonderful company of the Haubens.

We had thought about doing some fried chicken, but decided that might be hard b/c of so much time in the kitchen close to show time. We went ahead and tested fried chicken out ahead of time, and Sean knocked it out of the park, in my opinion....



Southern night made us miss Columbus and all our dear friends so much. We wish we could have ordered all of our favorites from Minnies, Girlfriends, Country's, etc. but we had to make due with our best attempt.

Prep pics...I have been bad about getting pics of the final products...need to work on that.



The menu was as follows:

Appetizers:
--Homemade cheese straws
--Pimento cheese dip

Dinner:
--BBQ Pulled Pork with mustard based BBQ sauce
--Collards
--Cheese Grits
--Tomato Pie
--Squash Casserole

Dessert:
--Phila's Pecan Pie
--Phila's Chocolate Chess Pie
--Fresh Whipped Cream

If I was all over it, I would have links to all the recipes that we used. Considering I started this post weeks ago, I am clearly not...