July 2021 • Every Day Dress by Rebecca Collins

Dinner on the Lower Deck

*my sister cut the flowers from my garden and set the table with two old brown toile runners on top of blue linen*

*mise en place for scratch vanilla* *bean ice cream, not a winning economical choice as the price of the ingredients far outweighs the very best store-bought*

*I like to kick things off with a margarita (sometimes two!), and these limes needed to be juiced anyway, they sat out too long in a bowl on the counter*

*homegrown peaches and blueberries in season so quickly assembled the base of the* *crumble, I never peel the peaches, why?*

had some red potatoes in the pantry so I boiled them with a good helping of salt until soft, put them on a foil-lined tray, smashed them with a masher, doused them with olive oil, butter, salt, and pepper, and baked them in a hot oven until crispy, turning them once

*close up of the potatoes and crumble all topped off with sugar, oatmeal, butter, cinnamon*

In keeping with previous thoughts about moving things around, I hosted a small dinner for five of us out at the country house down on our lower deck two nights ago. Sure, it means enlisting the help of some of your guests to get the necessities on-site (chairs!) and prepping a meal that doesn’t need to be served piping hot. It increases the work a bit, yet the result is always an evening to remember, and I absolutely love creating memorable evenings.

*after cooking I always like to quickly change into something a little more festive, even and especially just for family*

*served this up family-style,* *hot buttered lobster rolls, smashed potatoes*, *coleslaw, zucchini salad, cold sliced watermelon*

*Kubota ready to go to retrieve hot cobbler and cold ice cream*

It really was kind of an off-the-cuff thing, sister in town from San Fran and it was her last night. We had both been in New England the days before, and both of us had talked about eating lobster, and lobster rolls, she is dining alone at Black Point Inn in Scarborough ME, and me dining alone for lunch one afternoon just outside of Portsmouth NH. I was on one of my daily long walks while my husband was in an all-day board meeting and had been on the fence about stopping for lunch. I did end up stopping at an adorable little place directly on the water, and once seated realized it was a cash-only, bring your own beer/wine place. Having only twenty-one dollars in cash on hand, I couldn’t get the lobster roll, or the lobster salad, and had to settle on the chicken or to be specific chicken on top of the green salad. Had they sold beer or wine I might have forgone the chicken with my twenty-one dollars and had a beer and a salad, the salad without chicken or lobster. Anyway, I decided to make us some lobster rolls for our shared meal, with coleslaw, smashed potatoes, a blueberry peach cobbler, and homemade vanilla bean ice cream. She did a great zucchini, corn, and tomato salad to round things out. She and Elizabeth set the table, I got things together in the kitchen. Once we got everything down to the lower deck, we simply sat and enjoyed the evening while the sun went down, dining and talking and drinking wine, all until it felt time to retrieve the cobbler from the oven and the scratch ice cream from the freezer, all of which we enjoyed even further into the night.