Dinner for Fifteen!

Our sunroom is the most glorious place to host dinners. And dinner for 15 was meant we used the sunroom and then a little bit of the living room (where I am standing to take the picture). When we moved into our condo, there was a little dining room area between the kitchen pass-through and the "living room" proper, like most apartments. Our building is one of the rare few buildings in our part of Toronto to not have balconies. Instead, we have this beautiful sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows that runs the width of our unit.

One half (where I am now sitting) has been "converted" to my office/personal space, and the other side has been made into our dining room. It's a great space, and worked really well for dinner for fifteen.

And what a dinner. Since it was a high holidy, G had taken the day off work and cooked up a storm. Homemade roasted red peppers, heirloom tomato salad, roasted red and golden beet salad, green salad with eggs and avocado -- and those were just the starters!



Delish! For the main meal, G made an ENORMOUS 22 pound turkey. (There's lots left... come on over if you are hungry!) Unfortunately, no pics of the grand turkey are available, as I was serving drinks and whatnot for our guests while the dinner was being prepared for serving.

With the turkey we had roasted carrots (YUM!), roasted squash and potatoes, fresh Ontario green beans with a little butter, and stuffing. G's sister-in-law brought the stuffing which was amazing and weird all at the same time. It was really dense, very mushroomy, and full of stuffing flavours like sage and onion. It was addictive. We served everyone from the end of the table... it was only slightly chaotic...



That's me serving food. I am dishing up the potatoes, next to that on the left is the crazy stuffing, to the right are carrots, and in front of the potatoes are green beans, with the turkey right next to them. Oh yeah, really lovely.

For dessert, we had a variety of cakes that others brought, and for which I have no photos as by that time I was doing double time washing dishes and showing the kids all my cool toys (like my rocking TARDIS bank that lights up). We did get to use our new china that G's mom had though was destroyed when they moved from Rhodesia to Canada, but was actually just lying in wait in their basement! I will show you that when we get back fromour vacation and I make scones and clotted cream. Oh yeah baby!

Anyway, the dinner was a success. Everyone seemed to love the food, and were really happy with the way the dinner unfolded.

My favorite part of the evening was serving G's dad wine in our new stemless wine glasses. I asked him how he liked them, and he said, 'These are nice water glasses, I suppose.' To which I said, 'No, they are stemless wine glasses, we just bought them to go in the new kitchen.' And he looked at me with such pity in his eyes and said, 'Who told you that? These are water glasses.' Oh well, can't teach a 72 year old dog new tricks, I suppose.