It was a pretty chilly weekend entry into June. The sun had been warming, but as soon as you got out of that you could feel just the slightest of bites to the gentle breezes that swept through the trees.
By Sunday afternoon 06/02/19 I even got a fire going in the wood stove to take the edge out of the air. That sounds a little extreme, but Saturday during the night a dense and heavy wet fog had settled over the mountain. That fog had not lifted until mid afternoon, and we were in no mood to try to sit out on the porch.
We settled into the living room with some snacks to play backgammon around 4:00 pm, and get the Sunday Dinner Party For Two going! I had opened a nice $13 bottle of 2016 Ruffino Chianti Superiore, and we went right at it.
Just to bust my chops that she was 8 points up on me going into this series, Sue came to the table with her dad's old 'Sassy Sally' cap on. 'Sally' was the persona that she adopted when she worked at the Visa Center as a telephone customer service rep. To keep sane, she took on the character of 'Sally', a rough and tumble long haul trucker out of some remote area where life was what you made it.
Sue, as long haul trucker Sally, growling at me that she's going to hang onto her current 8 point lead.
Well, all that growling was for naught because I managed to cut my loss to just 4 points by the end of many spirited games, and glasses of wine. I was even up 5 or so points at one time. But I got greedy one time by flipping the cube to 4 at her. She just smiled and pulled it over onto her side. Lost that one by half a throw! Man, did I hear about that for the rest of the night!
Chuck had been texting us during the afternoon, and sent us the following picture of him and Denise at his mom's grave. It had been a really nice day there, and they had taken a ride over.
Denise and Chuck at Kathy's grave.
Around 5:00 pm, I put an Enya CD into the player and headed for the kitchen to start with the food prep. Even now, the 'kids' don't relate to CDs; it's all in the cloud. Everything is now 'in the cloud'. It's a wonderful thing, but Sue and I have a hundred or so CDs, and it's nice to throw some on every now and then. We do that almost every Sunday for our Dinner Party For Two party.
After changing CDs to listen to Miles Davis, Sue perched into the window seat, and we chatted while I chopped and readied everything for the eventual cooking part. There wasn't much prep work to do, actually. What hung me up was heating the basil infused water up for the wide egg noodles that I was going to fix. It took literally forever.... What's up with that? I even had to turn down the burner for the broccoli and red peppers that I was steaming so they wouldn't get done early.
I was just about through the prep work when a hard rain storm thundered down on us. There was one particularly brilliant lighting strike and almost immediate violent clap of thunder that caused the not so brave Beau Dog to come flying into the kitchen. He parked himself right in my high traffic area by the sink that I had to constantly step around his quivering body. We both kept talking to him, and patting him to reassure him that he'd be fine. He stayed right with us through the whole storm.
The main dish was a really nice Sicilian Lemon Chicken Piccata recipe that I had found. It had everything great in it: onions, capers, balsamic vinaigrette, garlic, fresh basil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, oregano, crushed herbed tomatoes. Normally, a picatta wouldn't have the tomatoes, but the Sicilian version does. And I think it really is a nice switch up from the standard lemon and caper versions.
Sicilian Lemon Chicken Piccata and a glass of wine just doesn't get any better than this!
After dinner, Sue and I watched the really engaging 2018 movie, Alpha, with the last of the wood buring down in the wood stove as the rain continued to pour down.