Cooking and Family’ing

adminbest friends, Corey Lambert, Family, flatwater, kitchen clambake, luxbar, Magic Hat Brewery, Man Friend, summer cooking, Uncategorized, Volare%s Comments

Exhibit A: Hazel Wegrich.  93. Grandmother. All-Around Amazing Lady.

My 93 year old grandmother got on a place for the first time in years and ventured from Florida to Chicago this past weekend.  A good dinner at Volare (minus the rave that was happening across the street- strobe lights and glow sticks don’t exactly say “welcome to Chicago, let’s have a nice, classy dinner”),  lunch at Luxbar, brunch at Flatwater and a kitchen clambake at our apartment made for a lovely weekend.

I love to cook.  Feeding the people I love is, to me, another way to love them.  With my mom and grandmother in town, it was only fitting that 3 of my best friends came over for dinner.  I am so lucky to have people in Chicago who are every bit as family as those as I am related to by gentics.  It’s also a lot of fun to be in a relationship with someone who loves entertaining as much as I do.  After flipping through The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, Man-Friend and I decided on a Kitchen Clambake–potatoes, kielbasa, shrimp, clams, mussels, salmon and crab steamed in white wine and, because Man-Friend got creative, Miller Lite.

Exhibit B: Our pot was not big enough for the mass amounts of seafood we bought.  So we improvised.

Since we have yet to put together our 4th kitchen table chair, we brought over the ottoman and all crowded around the table, digging into the caprese salad, cracking open crab legs, reaching for more mussels, breaking off pieces of delicious crusty bread.

Exhibit C: Finished product.

It was my favorite kind of meal, the kind that are filled with people I adore, tons of food, wine, “remember when” stories and last for hours.  It turns out that exactly 6 years ago, Corey, Amanda, Mike, Linda and I were in car on our way to New York City.  It was an amazing time in our friendship, a time when we were still young enough to have nothing else to do but be together.  That trip will forever be one of my favorite memories.  It was really special to be with those same people (minus Married Mike), celebrating the exciting changes that have happened recently in our adult lives and belly laughing over being 19 and stranded in Long Island at 4am.

There’s a month left of summer and I want it to be filled with nights just like last Saturday- cooking, story sharing, glass toasting and being with family–both the one I was born into and the one I have been lucky enough to have become a part of along the way.