Dinner Club, Apple Pie and Blind Squirrels

Just over 10 years ago Rachel and I started a monthly dinner club with 5 other couples in Evanston and Wilmette. The group had various individual work/neighbor/college connections, but overall we didn't know each other that well at first. It didn't take long.

The hosting responsibility rotated each month, and duties included a) picking a cuisine and/or theme, b) assigning out appetizers, side dishes, desserts, etc., c) preparing the main dish, and d) hosting. The first year we enjoyed Italian, Mexican, German, Fondue, Hawaiian, and Diner, among others. Everyone also brought beer and wine, and little of that was left at the end of the night. Dinner Club nights were raucous, fun affairs, and we all arranged our calendars to make sure we didn't miss. It was a big part of our social lives.

Along with the adults-only dinners we mixed in some family get-togethers, since our kids were all pretty close in age and got along wonderfully. This included a few road trips over the years, to Galena in Illinois, Lake Geneva and Elkhart Lake in Wisconsin, and even the maternity ward at Evanston Hospital, where in October of 1999 three Dinner Club Kids were born on the 1st, 2nd, and 4th...

Nothing lasts forever, though. After a few years one couple moved to California, another to the western suburbs of Chicago, and a third to the northwest suburbs. The clockwork monthly dinners became "a few times each year" for those of us still in Chicago, and "every couple of years" when the Californians came to visit. But we'd all gotten so close that there wasn't any talk of drafting replacements and re-forming an Evanston/Wilmette club; it would have felt like...cheating.

Four of the six families got together last Saturday at Kara and Rob's in Deerfield. We did our share of "My, how you've grown!" with each other's kids, and retold stories from the early days, especially about the folks who weren't there. It was a great meal and a great time.

I had been assigned a dessert, and I'm not really sure what Kara was thinking -- she has a pretty good idea of my cooking limitations. Was it an invitation for me to just bring something from Dominick's, like a quart of ice cream? Or was she mad at me for some reason? Or maybe it was a challenge, to see if I could rise to the occasion and really make a dessert?

I chose the last of these possibilities, and picked a recipe out of our recipe box: Sour Cream Apple Pie. We had loads of apples already, and it didn't seem too complicated. I remembered that we had an apple peeler/corer/slicer in the closet, which I figured out how to use, and it worked wonders; the apples took all of 5 minutes to prepare, sliced perfectly. And the rest of the recipe did seem to come together easily -- almost too easily. It goes like this:

Sour Cream Apple Pie

Filling:

2 Tbs flour

1/8 tsp salt

2/3 cup sugar

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup sour cream

Topping:

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar

Instructions:

1. Spread 2 cups thinly sliced apples evenly in a 9" pie shell. (Note to guys: you just buy the pie shell frozen, you don't make it.)

2. Combine filling ingredients, pour over apples.

3. Combine topping, sprinkle over pie.

4. Bake 25-30 min. at 425 degrees.

I had a friend whose expression for someone's unlikely accomplishment was "Well, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then." No one said that Saturday, but they'd have been justified, as the two pies turned out way better than I could have hoped. And better than everyone else was expecting, I'm sure. What else is in that recipe box?

So Dinner Club will continue meeting a few times each year, and I just may be able to hold up my end. Maybe.

Pat