So we’re doing Easter dinner with/for our friends Pat and Mary who live down the road. Dinner for eight. I said to Peter, “Okay, let’s not get too far out into culinary left field on this one…”, since in about half the guests’ cases we won’t know for sure how their tastes run, whether they like to get experimental at a holiday or whether they’re willing to swing out a little. “We’ll keep it fairly traditional. Lamb.”
“Pork,” says Himself.
“Lamb and pork,” say I. So we’re agreed. Leg of lamb in the Greek style, with a lot of fresh rosemary, fresh oregano and lemon: rolled loin of pork done in a northern Italian style, braised in milk, with herbs.
Then we start in on the side dishes. After some discussion, we decide on:
- Mashed potatoes.
- Canary potatoes, aka Patatas bravas (a sort of hot potato salad using new potatoes boiled in very salty water — it would be sea water, in the Canaries — and a spicy vinaigrette).
- A Moroccan carrot-and-orange salad.
- Green beans cooked in some as yet unspecified manner.
Mary and Pat will be handling the other salads, and the wine / beer / soft drinks end of things, so all we have left to worry about is dessert. And at this point I know just what we need.
- My “double Valrhona gold” ice cream, using both Valrhona solid single-estate chocolate and Valrhona’s cocoa.
- My “triple vanilla” ice cream with Madagascar high-potency vanilla extract, vanilla beans, and vanilla sugar. And:
- Peter’s “Baileys ripple” ice cream. (He’s not making the espresso ice cream that we usually refer to as “Nessun dorma”, because after eating it, “none shall sleep”: wouldn’t be kind to the dinner guests. They may not want to see the dawn that much.)
So I’m in the middle of hauling out the ice cream maker and getting the chocolate prepped when the mail arrives. Besides a bank statement regarding one of our accounts which has a truly tiny amount of money in it, there are two Very Important Looking Plain White Envelopes. One for P., one for me.
I open mine and discover…oh, wonder of wonders! Some nice marketing people in Dublin have sent me checks for, like, ninety thousand Euro or so! And all I have to do to claim them is call this nice phone number that costs €2.40 a minute!
(snort) I’m sooooooo excited. I bet that if you do call them, they keep you on the phone for about half an hour, minimum…and if by then you haven’t figured out that this is a scam… (sigh) And probably lots of people never do…or not for a long, long while, as they spend more and more money trying to “claim” this “prize…”.
Gonifs!! How do the people who do crap like this sleep at night? How do they justify it to themselves?? Argh!!
Oh well…back to the ice cream, and to concentrating real, real hard on not eating the chocolate.
(mutter) Gonifs.
