Anyone noticed how quiet the blog has been for the past couple of weeks? It’s been hot, really hot, and there have been a million tiny issues monopolizing my attention, from the theft of my phone (replacing a stolen phone from Apple and AT&T practically defines “blame the victim”), then there’ve been some issues with the restaurant construction (that again – too boring to go into details), and we had the whole Fourth of July kerfluffle. But I’m back and focused and we’re going to catch up with family meal pictures or die trying. So let’s go on a Family Meal Adventure!

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The following pictures were all taken with my terrible, hateful temporary cell phone and as a result these family meals look worse than they actually were. Oh, who am I kidding. Now that Jesus isn’t making family meals, they’ve gotten pretty bad.

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Tuesday, June 22: a salad, and that red thing is eggplant, mushroom and tomato mush. Yes, mush. That’s what we’ve been reduced to eating down here.

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Wednesday, June 23: Chipotle grits (on the right) and then an eggplant, tofu and tomato sauce…mush.

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Thursday, June 24: tired of mush, we made Thursday “Grill Day” and grilled everything. We’re talking grilled asparagus, grilled onions, grilled tofu and then we deep fried some mushrooms (in the back left) for variety and there’s the inevitable tomato sauce on the left, too.

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Friday, June 25: today got a little Italian/Canadian. There’s a tomato and cheese curd salad, garlic bread and a ricotta kind of lasagna thing with the inevitable tomato sauce in the middle.

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Saturday, June 26: Dirt Candy was closed today because I catered a private dinner for one of our longtime regular customer’s birthday. It was a lot of fun, and here’s what we were eating (and drinking) at the end of the night. If you expect me to remember what it was, sorry. Like I said: drinking. One thing I tried that worked well, though, was corn bread fritters. Because I couldn’t deep fry hush puppies at his house, I made corn bread fritters (roughly the same size and shape) and then toasted them right before service. The result: not bad at all.

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