Dining in the Basement

I was pretty excited about how my basement looked with paper lanterns and cheerful plastic carpet-substitute, but it's still not exactly a beautiful dining room. Nevertheless, I'm so happy having a table set up down there. Not only is it a tremendous saving of effort (carrying tables and chairs from an attic closet to the living room or backyard was no fun, nor was it much fun having a table filling my entire living room when I had guests), but also it stays cool down there in the summer even when I've been cooking all day.

The peppers are for the next night's pasta

We ate marinated grilled steaks and grilled artichokes with a mustard/mayo sauce I found online somewhere. Both were pretty good but tough, the steaks because they were from a healthy grass-raised cow who lacked tenderizing fat, the artichokes probably because I bought exceptionally cheap ones (the only reason we had them at all was because I was amazed by the low price). After twice in my life experimenting with doing other things with artichokes (and ordering them grilled at both Cheesecake Factory and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant whose name I don't remember), I think in the future I will stick with steaming them and eating them with melted butter and maybe a touch of lemon. Why mess with perfection?

The outstanding parts of the meal were Summer Vegetable Gratin from Cook's Illustrated (which called for a crazy number of steps but might actually have been worth it) and Herbed Potato Salad with Bacon and Scallions from The Union Square Cafe Cookbook (which was not only easy but also could be made ahead).

Someone's second helping

Dessert, from a magazine-clipping recipe, was also amazing but a recipe was hardly needed. It was just fresh berries macerated in lightly sweetened citrus juice topped with whipped cream. The secret to its amazingness was that I was using homemade vanilla extract (a bottle of vodka in which vanilla beans had been soaking for months) to flavor the whipped cream, and it was so pale I feared it lacked a strong vanilla flavor so I used lots. The resulting cream had just the right level of booziness to cut the sweetness and give the dessert an almost elegant feel. Of course the picture couldn't be less elegant, because I forgot to take pictures at all until we were scraping the bowl. With it we drank cold-brewed coffee flavored with spearmint-infused simple syrup.

Afterward we drank delicious cranberry wine that George and Jamie bought at a vineyard in Michigan.

The grilling, the clothing, and the green leaves probably seem odd for a late October post; I'm behind again: this meal took place August 2nd.