Family Reunion- Larson Brackenbury Meals

Our gracious hosts, the Brackenbury Larson family, cooked a few meals for us as well.  Most of us were staying at the old Stage Coach stop house.  We had a lunch there that served as great fuel for afternoon hikes.  We had turkey sandwiches on homemade date bread.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the date bread but it actually had great flavor and went really well with the turkey.  They had also made an herb butter spread to put in the sandwiches.  I love herb butter.  Butter is already an amazing spread but adding herbs to it takes it to a whole new level.  We also had some coleslaw on the side with the sandwiches.

The Larson family also served dinner in the old house.  The appetizers alone were to die for.  The first amazing offering was almond stuffed and bacon wrapped dates.  Perfect little bites with great flavor.  There was also a plate of Idaho cheese and crackers as well as a clam dip and dried vegetable chips.  I’m wary of clam foods but this, luckily, had a very subtle clam flavor.  We were also served a platter of caprese salad: tomatoes, mozzarella and basil.  While we chowed down on these delights we played a word game and sipped cocktails.  We had our choice of frozen strawberry daiquiris (which were dangerously delicious) or a drink called Porch Swing.  This drink was a mixture of lemonade, gin and mint.  I believe there were cucumber slices in it as well.  This drink was very refreshing.  I’ll have to remember it for the summer.  As if this wasn’t enough, we also had the main dinner!  They had made feta and Greek olive stuffed chicken and served huge pans of it on the table.  This was served with a salad.  Dessert was a crostada filled with strawberries and rhubarb.

We were treated to a breakfast up at their new house one morning.  They had large doughnuts that have been dubbed “Tractor Tires.”  They made both doughnuts and doughnut holes.  The dough itself was very tasty but they also made different glazes to put on top.  We had coconut, almond, lemon and plain glaze.  I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite out of all those flavors.  Along with these sweet treats we had homemade elk sausage.  I couldn’t tell much of a difference between the elk sausage and regular breakfast sausage but I do know that it had great flavor.  Our hosts also offered us orange juice to drink.

The Larsons invited us up to the new house for another dinner as well.  They have a large gas grill so they prepared grilled pizzas for us.  They made dough from scratch and rolled out very thin crusts.  We had a whole production line of people rolling out dough and chopping up toppings.  On top of the crusts they put a little olive oil and Greek seasoning.  I helped them cut up the different toppings for the pizzas.  We had cheese, red and yellow bell peppers, assorted garden herbs, pepperoni, mushrooms, jalapenos, tomatoes, olives, asparagus, green onion and basil.  With the pizzas all made up they carefully slid them onto the grill outside.  Once the crust turned crispy, they brought them in to be devoured by the guests.  They made lots of different combinations of toppings.  It was an ambitious thing to make for a group because it took quite a few of these pizzas to satisfy us all.  The chef had to come in and fight for his own slices of pizza in the frenzy.  After dinner they serenaded us with their guitar and fiddle so that they could test out their new sound equipment.  They even wrangled their two daughters into playing the violin and singing along.