BBQ Time!

Finally a little peace and quiet to blog!  Well a little bit anyway.  This will be a quick one because I have a few more post to do and a ton of work on my plate.  Work, oh man, that is a whole different story and one that I won't get into this week for lack of time.

What a great weekend Nick and I had.  On Saturday we piled into our Pilot with a group of friends and headed to Napa for some wine tasting.  I will try to post pics of that in my next posting.  On Sunday though, we decided to have an impromptu get together with the Ryan's for Memorial Day weekend.  I bought a Pismo for Nick to learn to butcher.  If you're a fan of Good Eats on Food Network you may have seen Alton Brown giving an in depth tutorial on how to trim and cut one of these tenderloins.  Nick has been wanting to do this since we saw an old rerun of the show.  Since we have my parents' anniversary dinner coming up we decided that we needed to practice.  In common form, Nick did all the meat handeling while I prepared everything else.  It is unbelievable how much time it takes to trim these things when you're first starting.  He learned that for the next round we will have to cut the filets a little thicker.

Glad all this fat was thrown away and not in our bodies!

In the mean time while Nick was butchering his cow, I prepared ears of corn with melted butter, garlic powder, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce.  I simply melted the butter, stirred in the ingredients, then I brushed it all over the corn and wrapped it tightly in foil.  After that, I assembled my spinach caprese salad.  For some reason I like to make this salad when we have company.  I think it's because it is different than your plain old iceberg with tomatoes and mushrooms.  We grilled up some marinated portobello mushrooms to put on top for an extra kick.  I also made my friend Abby's hot fudge sauce and homemade whipped cream for dessert sundaes and did some chocolate covered strawberries appetizers to have with the excellent pinot noir I bought over the weekend.  For the strawberries I used a double boiler and melted half a stick of butter with about a cup and a half of milk chocolate.  I was winging it, but they turned out pretty well.  It would have been better if they had time to sit in the fridge over night though.  They were still warm when the Ryan's arrived.  The house smelled so much of chocolate because I had two pots a-brewin'.  

I did these!  My grilling skills are getting much better!

For some reason this didn't rotate properly, but just
imagine this salad right side up.

Unsurprisingly, we ate everything.