Stew!

I am extremely pleased with how my dinner turned out last night. I made my mother's very special beef and vegetable stew recipe that I've always loved and wanted to learn how to do. I was really nervous about it, more nervous than I've been about a dish in a long time. It was really important to me that it come out right, and not only did it taste the way it was supposed to, everybody ended up really liking it. While I enjoyed the company of everyone present, I had planned for the guest list to be slightly different. Several of the people I invited at first couldn't make it, so I ended up filling in the gaps with people from slightly different social circles, so perhaps it was not the most compatible set of dinner guests I've ever had at Elsinore, but I still thought it was nice. For those of you who may not have exactly felt like they were clicking, I apologize. But I'm still glad it happened, I had fun, and I got to prove to myself that I could make a recipe that was vry important to me.