I gave a dinner party Sat. night for 8 and got ALL the good stuff out for the first time in years. (One of the guests is a State Rep and another is on the local School Board.) But, I used the garage to keep the beer and white wine cold and to keep the salads cold that I had made earlier in the day, as well as the pheasants that my husband had cooked the night before and the wild rice that I prepared that morning.
An hour before the guests arrived, I popped the pheasants into my “Nesco” to bring to serving temperature and put the wild rice into the slow cooker to reheat. I only had to slip the glazed arrots into the microwave, make the rolls, and pour the wine and water while guests were enjoying appetizers and drinks in the living room, and we were all ready to eat.
It would have been easy peasy, except for all of the silver and crystal polishing the week before and all the hand washing afterwards. My husband left to go hunting in Missouri first thing the next morning (after helping me with a lot of the clean up and locking the silver back into the safe in the basement) but I feel like a ton of bricks has fallen on me after putting away everything else. Every muscle aches from the hundreds of trips to and from the kitchen returning the crystal and good dishes to their regular homes.
I just have to iron the napkins we used and figure out how to salvage the table cover which suffered candlewax and berry jam stains. Luckily, the table cover really is a beautiful, elegant, polished cotton, quilted bedspread that I bought very cheap on a super sale a few years back. It has two sides, and the damage did not go all the way through. So, if I can’t get the wax and the berry stains out, I’ll just turn it over and use the other side.
I have more pheasants in the freezer and need to do this all over again before that crystal needs washing again and before the silver tarnishes. I think there is still food out in the garage.
I even ordered a special flower arrangement for the party. I took the extra care to take a sample of my dishes (which have little cornflower blue flowers all over to them) and the linens and the candles and the silver centerpiece (where the flowers would eventually go) down to the florist and asked him to design something — any color but with touches of blue to pick up the dishes.
I might have well skipped that trip. The flowers were gorgeous, but by the time we dimmed the chandelier and lit the candles you absolutely could not see the blue flowers (delphinium, I think). They faded to black under candlelight. Luckily the florist had mixed the arrangement with white chrysanthemums and lilies and little green berries, so it still looked beautiful. But I wouldn’t stress him finding blue flowers again. You couldn’t even notice them.
It was a problem finding blue flowers in the first place because I ordered them just a few days after Veteran’s Day, and the flower mart was all sold out of blue.