Saturday's Dinner

So my very old friend...Well, she's not that old. She's 50 but keeps trying to convince me she's 48! Poor thing, she's in denial. We've been friends since 1980. It's a period that Poppy calls "The Lost 80's" because there are no pictures of me and I don't remember a lot of it. I could go into more detail on that, but no one wants to hear about all that. Needless to day, I had really big hair! Anyway, my friend, Jeannie and her boyfriend, Tom came down from Sacramento on Saturday. This was the first time Poppy and I met Tom and man, he's a riot. We laughed the whole time. So, they came down to the Bay Area just to get out of Dodge for a few days. They spent a few hours down at Fisherman's Wharf and then came over for dinner. This is where it gets good cause it's all about the food...Jeannie had been here last year for a while and one of the meals we cooked for her were Ribeyes with Roquefort butter. So Jeannie had been talking about those Ribeyes to Tom for a few months so that was her requested dinner. Becky and I make a rub called "Kecky's Steak Shake". It's one of the products that we made for all our friend's and family for Christmas gifts. So, I rubbed some Steak Shake on the Ribeyes and Poppy happily grilled them. I served them with mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy and a simple green salad. I used a mix of Red and Yukon Gold potatoes and left the peels on. I almost always use chicken broth as my potato boiling liquid. For the gravy, I take about a cup of assorted dried mushrooms and simmer them in a couple of cups of water for about 20 minutes. Then I strain the liquid and rinse the mushrooms. I chop up the mushrooms and reserve about 1/2 cup for the gravy. I take the mushroom liquid, add a little Marsala wine and reduce that to about 1/2 cup of liquid. To that I add 1-1/2 cups of milk and that's my gravy liquid. Make the roux and then add the liquid and the chopped mushrooms, stir until it's thick and call it gravy. It's really very NOM NOM. Almost NOM NOM Infinity. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the finished product so here's a picture of the leftovers that will be dinner tonight! Now a word or two...or three about dessert...Jeannie and Tom stopped at a market called the Nugget. I've been to the one in Sacramento. Very large and most the veggies are local grown. So they stopped at the Nugget in Davis to pick up dessert and a bottle of wine. The wine was one of our staples, Big House Red and the dessert was indescribable. One was this to-die-for-mouth-watering-brownie (about the size of a brick and about as heavy!) that had this German chocolate sort of topping. The other was a mocha/coffee flavored cake. The cake was dark chocolate and frosting was mocha/coffee that practically melted in your mouth. We could hardly even talk after the dinner carnage was over. We all happily retired to the living room...especially Tom who found the miracle of our Laz-a-Boy reclining theatre seats.