Dinner for Five

I tend to post what I cook on Facebook, which led to my friends inviting themselves over for dinner. I didn't mind at all--I love cooking for guests; it's the dishwashing that gets to me. So I came up with a rule of using breakables for dinner parties of six people or less, and disposables for parties of more than six. (Please forgive me, Mother Earth. I rarely entertain big numbers anyway...)

On the night of the scheduled dinner, my husband's car was "coding," as we call it here in Manila. To the uninitiated, coding is some sort of traffic management scheme--cars with license plates ending in certain numbers aren't allowed on the street on particular days (e.g., 1 and 2 for Monday, 3 and 4 for Tuesday...). This is lifted after 7:00 pm. (Are there other countries that do this?) By the time he picked me up from work and I got my last-minute shopping done, it was 8:30 pm. So I didn't have time to prepare anything fancy...

We started off with bacon-wrapped asparagus (not shown; recipe in the Jan-Feb issue of Good Housekeeping), then had pan-fried rosemary pork steak (a house favorite; lotsa meat for the boys, but not as pricey as beef), and lemon-cream pasta with asparagus (recipe in the April issue of Good Housekeeping!). Yeah, I had a lot of asparagus in the fridge! And Jerry, a true-blue carnivore who's been my friend since high school, noticed how I was sneakily trying to feed him veggies.

I'm hoping next time we host dinner, it'll be on a weekend, so I'll have time to make something more elaborate, plus whip up dessert from scratch. (Jerry brought blueberry cheesecake. I've been dreaming of making red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.) Who wants to come over?:D