Hey Folks!
Is it really Monday already? And when did it become October? Who’s excited to hear lots of innuendo about balls accompanying tomorrow’s dinner? Everyone? You’re all dirty.
Thai Chicken Balls, scaled to 12 servings,
but 2 pounds of meat, one pound of fake-meat are the first item on the menu tomorrow. This will be accompanied by (but not really meant to mix with) Roasted and Curried Butternut Squash Soup, scaled to 16 servings.
As planned, we made vegetarian chili and cornbread this week for dinner (even though the weather improved dramatically between Sunday and Monday, and could have been a great day to grill something). Rarely being one to back down from a challenge, I scaled the chili recipe to feed 24 people, despite some notes in the comments indicating the original recipe claiming to serve eight would easily feed 10 or 12….especially if you were to […] serve with maybe some grated cheddar, sour cream
(which, of course, we did). This meant we’d be using nine 28oz cans of whole tomatoes, six 15oz cans of beans, three 15oz cans of corn, and six 12oz packages of burger crumbles, among other things, which any reasonable person would probably A. immediately identify as way more than we needed to eat, and B. laugh at the prospect of putting into one pot.
Not me.
Happy Fall, Everyone!
With the recent drop in temperatures (and the rather dreary weather today, in particular), it’s really started to feel like fall, and has put me in the mood for soup. Chili happened to be a featured recipe on the front page of AllRecipes.com today, so that really sealed the deal. Naomi used to make a pretty mean vegetarian chili, and she gave her stamp of approval to this recipe I found, with a couple suggested tweaks, so I’m excited! The chili (optionally topped with sour cream, cheese, and/or onion) will be served with corn bread and/or baguette as you desire.
For tonight’s dinner, Axelina pulled two tasty recipes out of a pile of cooking magazines of which she was the lucky recent recipient. The prep work involved a lot of peeling and dicing for the veggie salad (which was then essentially complete) and a bit of dicing and spicy, eye-watering sautéing for the enchilada filling, but didn’t end up terribly spicy when all was said and done. As Dave commented, this was one of the most surprisingly filling MND entrées he’s ever had, with even big eaters being satisfied after the first serving.
I got two mailing lists set up. Dinner
is for the actual MND emails that will go around like normal, announcing ingredients, etc. Once you’re registered, you accomplish this by just sending email to dinner@mnmnd.com, and it should go out to all members interested in receiving such emails (since people can remove themselves at any time). There’s also a Social
list (social@…) that works the same way, but is intended for non-MND events/topics still targeting a similar (but not necessarily identical) group of people. You should automatically be subscribed to both of these lists once you register for this site, but can easily remove yourself by logging into this site, editing your profile (click your name at the top right after logging in), and unchecking one or more boxes at the bottom of your profile page.
There’s also an easy invite
feature you can use once you’ve registered for the site and logged in. I think it should appear on the main dashboard
. Let me know if that’s not the case.
Also, when you sign up, you’ll first just be a subscriber,
but I’ll change your user level so you can do more interesting things once you’re confirmed and I get a chance.
After three years of Monday Night Dinner, I’ve finally gotten around to [starting] setting up a web site for the ordeal. My short-term vision for this is to run a mailing list, possibly integrated into this blog, to enable people to easily opt-in or opt-out of being on the MND emails, and not requiring everyone to maintain their own list of who they think is [still] interested. The blog itself can be used by hosts or attendees to document the meals that we prepare, for posterity’s sake. It’s not uncommon for people to ask for recipes, or try to remember how we did something, or how something turned out; while email archives provide some help with that, I think that this could be an order of magnitude nicer, if done well.
My long-term vision is a fancier custom system, where MND members can log in and claim
a Monday to host, and then include the recipe(s) up-front, and have a nice system for dividing up ingredients. Attendees can also log in to mark intended attendance or absence for future dates, so as to facilitate easier planning for the host. Unless you’ve developed a system whereby your body can survive without Oxygen (or you don’t much care for this life), though, I’d recommend against holding your breath waiting for this long-term vision. If you have other ideas, suggestions, or requests, please let me know!
In the meantime, feel free to check out the little about page I whipped up, which you can now use as easy reference if you’re ever trying to explain MND to a newbie :).
