Cheery Chums and Chimichurri

The one-month anniversary of our trip is tomorrow, which spurred us to get it together to invite some pals over for a cookout and slideshow at our pal J's place. He lives on a beautiful farm owned by some lovely folks who've been there for many, many years. It's the perfect venue for outdoor  get-togethers, and tonight's slide show was such a success that we're thinking of hosting regular movie nights out there.

Last night we enjoyed a lazy supper and party planning/prepping session, part of which entailed rigging up this "screen," which is one of P's sheets, on the barn. Fun.

After dark we did a dry run of the slide show and oohed and ahhed at the landscapes as if these were someone else's pix. I'm still amazed by them, and I'm still in awe of digital cameras. We have around 500 pix of our trip, many of which are not particularly evocative, but literally hundreds of which are. Like this one:

 

We'd planned our menu well in advance, trying to replicate an authentic Argentine meal, and I think we got close. But it ain't easy cooking for 30, which meant lots of prep time, including heading to the Farmers' Market Sat. and preparing marinades and making last-minute grocery runs this morning. We met this afternoon a little after 2:00 p.m. to be able to receive guests at 6 p.m. That's 4 folks chopping and marinating and food processing and whisking and chimichurri-making and flower arranging at a pretty good clip. Whew!

It did look purty though when we were finished. On the menu: grilled (marinated) venison steaks, asparagus, and corn on the cob, roasted peppers, salad fixins (lettuce mix, cabbage -- red and green, celery, carrots, cucumber, leeks, red onion, cilantro, peppers, hard-boiled eggs), an amazing stewed carrot dish made by the matriarch of the farm, a dee-lish pasta salad side dish brought by our friend M, and three different kinds of chimichurri. Yum! Plus, 13 or so bottles of Argentine wine, of which only 7 or 8 or 10 were consumed. Wait, did I mention the homemade sweet potatoe pies? It really helps to have a matriarch around, I tell you.

I was on flower arrangement detail, and though I don't know that I have any real aptitude for it, you cannot go wrong on a farm as bountiful as this. Quince, Red Bud, Curly Willow, Honesuckle, Dogwoods, some extravagant pink thing I don't know the name of, and lots of nice, dried flowers and stalks to round it out. Sadly, my and everyone else's favorite arrangement is at the far end of the picture.

Comments

[Marcie]

Make sure you read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, A, and also, watch Garden State--the music and the story will take you away for an hour and 44 minutes--a good mini-vacation that can't match Argentina, but stll helps in these cold springy dark rainy days. You would have loved the questions that students asked today, and the riff that Safran Foer did on each question. So beautiful. This is such a pleasure to read your words.

[ae]

Marcie!! Wish I hadn't missed Safran Foer, but it'll just give me the opportunity to have a nice, long chat with you about it! I look forward to reading his book. Let me know what you think. I'm so glad you stopped by. xoxo!