Emily learns more about making bread, and we have a dinner party for an unknown amount of unknown people

"Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing 

some people have entertained angels without knowing it." 

Hebrews 13:2

Today we had a dinner party for some prospective members of a new life group in our house. The trouble was that we absolutely could not figure out how many people were coming. At first I was going to have roast chicken, as I had two nice little chickens that we could rotisserie in the Meile oven. But if only one couple showed up that would look like over kill. And if I cooked only one chicken and four couples showed up, I would not have enough to feed them. So finally, after a bunch of thinking, I decided to serve spaghetti. That's about as flexible as it gets. You make a lot of sauce, but only but on the table what you need. And when you finally do know how many people are coming to dinner, you cook just the right amount of noodles. And I always make two loaves of bread, so no problems there. I also made up a batch of salad dressing, and washed, tore up, and dried two bunches of lettuce. For dessert I decided that I would make an apple crisp and get some ice cream to go with it, and I still had some of the brownies left over from Sunday.


I have gotten so I think that I imagine that whatever I make there will be people who don't like it. This dinner was no exception, though I think for the most part they liked the dinner. I starting to worry about myself. I always feel that whatever I do will be a failure, and any bit of criticism can really get me down. It's not good.


We had worked the night before on getting the house straightened up. With Emily over every day it seems a real chore to keep things tidy. But Riley even did the vacuuming the night before. I would have set the table, but as I said, I didn't know how many people were coming. I decided that I would add one leaf to the table and set three on a side for starters. As it turned out we had eight of us for dinner, so I just had to add places at the end of the table.


At around 9:30 this morning I started making the bread, and as usual, Emily was very keen to help. She is getting to really get the hang of participating. This time she learned about kneading the bread. And she took to it enthusiastically.

First she helped stir the water into the flour.

Then when she had it stirred in to her liking (and mine) I added the yeast and mixed in thoroughly in the mixer.

Then after I got the yeast mixed into the dough and kneaded it in the machine, I turned it out onto the board for Emily to knead.











It turned out to be wonderful bread.  I was able to get everything ready on time. What a relief. In the end we had 6 guests, so there were eight of us at table. We had a very nice time, and everyone left at about 8:30. This was brought on by the fact that one of the couples needed to get the child to bed.

"Once you can accept the universe as being something 

expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, 

wearing stripes with plaid is easy." 

Albert Einstein