We decided that this month’s family dinner had to be on Father’s Day. What better day to do a family dinner than on the day we celebrate a member of the family?! My dad does so much for our family and is without a doubt always there for us (love you Dad!) so he definitely deserved a special dinner.
Technically we had 2 family dinners this month but only really documented one. The Sunday before last was Steve’s birthday and we went to their house for a delicious dinner Natasha made. Just a little peek of that dinner with Steve in his birthday present:
Father’s Day ended up being a beautiful day over here which meant we could grill and eat outside on the deck. Yes! It has rained a lot this summer so it was such a relief to have a good, kind of hot day. There wasn’t much of an extravagant table setting this month, just a simple setting with Mom’s summer lemon plates.
On to the first part of the meal: drinks. My dad isn’t really much of a drinker so I made one alcoholic beverage and one non-alcoholic. For the alcoholic drink I went with a Jack and Cherry Cola Slushie from my new Food Network Magazine. We don’t really drink a lot in my family anyway so we take advantage of our dinners together to try out new drinks. The overall consensus of the slushie was that it was strong so I will probably do less Jack the next time I make it but it was still delicious and worth making again.
Our non-alcoholic drink also came from the Food Network Magazine (I used it quite a bit this dinner). This is a Strawberry Lemonade made from scratch and extremely easy to make. All you have to do is juice about 8 lemons to get 1 cup of lemon juice and mix that with 1 cup of strawberry puree. Then you add sugar, which I want to say was 1/2 cup but I’m not 100% positive so really just do that to your personal taste. As with most of my recipes lately, I used coconut sugar in this drink. Lastly you add 5 cups of cold water and stir until the sugar dissolves. And done! I doubled the recipe since lemonade is one of my dad’s favorite drinks and it came out great.
Now for food. We actually went pretty simple this month and stuck with things we could just stick on the grill. We defrosted some chicken breasts and just salt and peppered those then added a bourbon bbq sauce Dad brought back from a work trip. My parents also bought black bean burgers and sweet Hawaiian hamburger buns to put them on (I put my chicken on those instead of a burger).
Next, we grilled up some corn for those who wanted it, as well as asparagus drizzled with rosemary olive oil and salt & pepper.
I also made a potato salad sans the mayo dressing! This recipe is from Wegmans and used Greek yogurt instead. It is considered a healthier version of potato salad but I really chose it because I prefer red potatoes.
Again, it was a pretty simple meal but everything was scrumptious and very filling. I almost forgot Mom’s quick cucumber salad! You can see that in the picture below. This is essentially just cucumber, red onion, salt, pepper, olive oil, dill and feta. Anything with feta is bound to be amazing in my opinion.
My favorite part of any meal: dessert! I’m sure I say this every single dinner but I LOVE dessert. I wanted to do something different and my Food Network Mag gave me just that. The magazine has a little blueberry desserts section and in there they had these Blueberry Shortcakes with Coconut-Lime Whipped Cream. Doesn’t that just sound spectacular?! This was the first time I have ever made shortcakes but they actually weren’t too hard and baked without incident. The nice thing about this dessert is that you get your sweet ending without it being overly sweet plus you can switch out the blueberries with a fruit of your choice.
That’s about it for family dinner but I hope you enjoyed seeing this month’s eats. If you’d like any of the recipes from this post just let me know and I will post them for ya! And a special shout-out to Steve for being my photographer!
JLTrrzs says
Please share the recipe for the Cherry Cola Slushie! Everything looks delicious!