When I was in culinary school, my sister gave me a little magnet as a gift. It read, “good cooks never lack good friends.” Oh snap! Raise your hand if you know that’s true. Before we moved, I was usually trapped in the apartment all day, because we shared a car, and Joe would drive it to work. And there’s nowhere to go on foot in the California suburbs, people. This surprisingly didn’t bother me that much, until I decided to enter a Philadelphia Cream Cheese Contest. I’d be inspired and motivated to test out a recipe for it all day, but would have to wait until Joe came home at night to go out shopping for the ingredients. Boy did this make me antsy!
Then entered in Vanessa. It’s one of those stories where we met earlier, but didn’t become friends until later. Long story short, she ended up being my cream cheese angel by volunteering to take me grocery shopping multiple times, so that I was able to enter this contest. As you may know, I didn’t win, but it was still a great experience. Through it all, I always wondered why she kept selflessly helping me, until I figured it out: I fed her.
I’m just kidding. She just has a really good heart. But she did get to reap the fruits of my labor by taste testing two of my recipes. If you’re curious to what they were, check here and here. Then what do you know, it was time for us to move and guess who came to our rescue again? Vanessa and her husband, Jason made our move a success. So I wanted to cook them a thank you dinner.
Jason provided the boxes, packaging tape, tape gun, and even his van! Vanessa helped me pack. And let me tell you, the kitchen stuff alone took DAYS. We ended up hiring professional movers for the first time in our lives- which by the way, is TOTALLY worth it. After a certain age, you just feel bad asking your friends to help you lift your heavy dresser down the stairs. But Vanessa and Jason were still there to help speed along the progress and save us some money.
Basically, these two crazy nuts went above and beyond what I think is required in the friendship hand book, so I really wanted to make them feel special with a home cooked meal.
But that didn’t stop them from bringing their own appetizer along. Jason made some shrimp ceviche, and it was darn good. Man, I am distracted by Vanessa’s perfectly manicured nail in that picture.
I ended up making them my avocado and tomato bruschetta, which they demolished. You can get the recipe here.
And then I made lasagna rolls, which is just a little spin on a classic lasagna. But I’m still working on a more simplified recipe, which I will hopefully post in the near future.
The side dish was brussel sprouts sauteed in bacon, which was inspired by our friend Dan Chung. I’ll post my version of this recipe in my next entry. Vanessa went to town on these sprouts.
And after a walk to digest our very full bellies, we came back to a dessert of refreshing watermelon and lime granita. I just posted the recipe for this in my last entry. I purposely made this for them because Jason is obsessed with anything watermelon.
They enjoyed everything and even gladly took leftovers I packed for them. In return, they left us ceviche. By the way, I don’t really know what’s going on in this picture.
Really, one meal doesn’t make up for everything they did to help us, but I’m sure there will be plenty more dinners to come. So the moral of this story is: listen to my magnet. If you want fabulous friends, get in the kitchen, and get cookin’ good lookin.’
