Friends and food

My good friend Lindsay came to visit us today.  We don't get a chance to visit with her too often.  Just a week after my wedding, she flew to serve 2 years in Mauritania, Africa with the Peace Corps.  Then, after a brief visit home, she left to pursue her masters at Tulane in New Orleans.  She is finally home.  For good.  We think :)

To mark this special visit from Lindsay, I got cooking in the kitchen!  I don't have any pictures of the food (we ate it all) but I assure you it looked good and was delicious.

We had steak from the local farm with a topping of caramelized onions.  We had a salad with feta, strawberries, cranberries, sugar coated pecans (minus the cinnamon) and this amazing dressing that I will over-use for the next few years until I am bored with it.  Top that off with a pillsbury roll and we were in heaven.

The entire meal, all we could think about was dessert.  I went a wee bit overboard.  The dessert consisted brownies topped with Supreme Strawberry Topping, Sugar Coated Pecans and Sweetened Whipped Cream.

(Photos taken directly from allrecipes.com)

The best part about our meal was the origin of the some of the foods.  The steak was from the local grass-fed beef farm (Wagon Wheel Ranch).  The onion was from our local CSA farm.  The pecans came from our Aunt & Uncle's tree in Texas (thanks Dan & Annette!!!).  The whipped cream was homemade and the strawberry dessert was made with an appropriate amount of sugar (...well...by MY standards anyway!). 

I'm not sure that I will ever be able to make a meal this elaborate using only local/homemade foods, but this was was a fairly successful attempt.  It's the little things that make me happy...and chocolate...

Leo was just excited Mom was baking again.