Food and Fellowship

Fellow Unitarian Universalists (along with many other church goers) are familiar with the coffee hour fellowship that follows Sunday services. This informal gathering is probably more important to some than is the formal service. Zoom church makes this difficult, and even our masked in-person meetings are happening without the "after" part, as we forgo eating and drinking together in the name of public health. Our first Sunday service of the new year (a "Zoom only" affair) sought to rectify this missing piece with "Breakfast Church". Since this had to be strictly BYOB we found a fun recipe to try with thanks to the New York Times Cooking Page. Although we had previously made Dutch Baby with Bacon and Runny Camembert, the simple Dutch Baby was, well, simpler. With just a few basic ingredients, a blender and a hot oven we had a tasty breakfast treat in about a half an hour - and it looked really cool, too. We sprinkled the puffy pancake with some powdered sugar, and added a few teaspoons of apricot jelly. We shared stories and enjoyed our respective meals via our online gathering. Breakfast at Casa Hayesboh is, of course, always paired with fresh roasted, fairly traded, organic coffee. For Breakfast Church we also imbibed some mimosas.

Dutch Baby hot out of the oven!

New Year's Eve dinner - Fettuccini with Chicken and Mushrooms

Welp, 2021 closed much the same way that 2020 did, so as we entered our third year of pandemic James and I spent a quiet evening at home. We managed to stay up until about 10:30 before we decided we'd had all the Netflix excitement two baby boomers could take. We did however, have a lovely meal before we settled in to the boob tube.

We selected Fettuccini with Chicken and Mushrooms from one of the oldest cookbooks on our shelf - 365 Ways to Cook Pasta. The recipe was selected because we had chicken and mushrooms in our larder. It calls for a mix of white button, shiitake, and oyster mushrooms. I only used the first two of these. We had purchased some white mushrooms for another recipe, and the shiitake came from a log James insisted we take with us from a shiitake mushroom farm we visited on Martha's Vineyard - our last trip before the country shut down in March 2020. The log was supposed to have been soaked that spring in order to cause the mushrooms to come out, but that was never done, so were were pleasantly surprised to find a 'shroom growing out of the log earlier in the week. I plucked it to use in our last meal of 2021.

The accidental shiitake mushroom

The recipe itself was of a rather straightforward chicken/pasta/creamy-tomato-sauce variety. Peas were also added to make it a complete meal in itself.