Reunion Food - Day 2

Thursday became a day of invention as we took stock of the supplies that we had and the tools to cook them. While the raw vegan set in the family would have been happy, what the heck were we going to do with all that chicken?

Lunch was a weird repeat of the flat top pizza - this time the meat lovers and the left over veg pizza were on the flat top cooking. Salty cheese I have to say.

So we fired up the barrel (trough) grills that had these intense rebar-like racks. Katy and I marinated the chicken in lemon juice, olive oil, and garlic. We tossed in fresh oregano and salt and pepper and let the stuff hang out for a while. We had to grill up a ton of the Scattergood baby eggplants. After we grilled them (actually Matt, Sam and Pirc did most of the grilling) we cubed the eggplant and mixed it with sauteed onion and garlic, more lemon juice and olive oil, salt, fresh mint, and basil. It's our version of the Silver Palette Summer Eggplant. Serve it room temperature and even non-eggplant lovers will love it.

We had lots of grilled veggies and another amazing salad. Our appetizers on Thursday were quantites if hummos and baba ganoug from the Pita Inn carried in a cooler from Skokie by my husband. He managed to have a "driving on a permit" student driver hit the car in an ice stop somewhere in Minnesota, so we enjoyed and appreciated each delicious bite.

All Thursday, Sam was on the phone - to the appliance guy and then to every Propane dealer in the area to find the folks who would service the ovens. Lots of not much luck. The guys from Swish's Hardware (not kidding) a store that used to be owned by a guy named Zen (a name that gave us hope that all would work out) came out and declared, "It's broken. We don't do commercial machines." The propane guy said almost surely it would need a part that wouldn't arrive before Monday - and we kept hoping that someone would make the oven's work. We had 5 turkeys thawing in the walk-in.

Sam continued with the persistance for which he is renouned. More on Friday. Think Swish- Zen -accio part - ovenus repairo.

Reunion Food Part Two

Once again the Potter family managed four days of amazing foods cooked under less than optimal circumstances.

Liz's menus had many more options for improvising and for vegetables many ways. This worked. Tim bought the produce and brought amazing eggplant, onions, beets, garlic, and other delicious stuff from the Scattergood School and Farm. Tuesday, Liz and I went shopping for most of the grocery items and she finished up the rest on Wednesday.

We got to the camp and one of the two ovens was eviscerated, a disappointment for sure.

Wednesday night was supposed to be pizza and I made my favorite pizza dough recipe from Anna Thomas's The New Vegetarian Epicure.
1/2 C Milk
3/4 C Warm Water
1 T yeast
1/2 t salt
1t sugar
3 C flour
a bit of olive oil -

I quadrupled the recipe and it made 3 full sheet pans of pizza - I put the cheese only - kid friendly - one in at 500+° oven and then after about 10 minutes when the sausage pepperoni carnivores pizza and the crimini mushroom, sweet pepper, onion, and olive pizza were ready to go in, it occurred to me that the cheese pizza was not almost done (as it should have been). Oven two - out of commission. So we cooked the cheese and vegetable pizzas on the flat top. This was creative, cooked the bottom of the crust nicely, but left the middle of the crust chewier than I love. All in all it worked just fine. That along with cold meat planned for lunches and an enormous, delicious salad by Tim and Duon made the meal late but tasty. We crashed into our tents - tired and full - even though it was still hot and humid and we were feeling cranky.