Lemon cake

Delicate lemon flavored cake with piped plain whipped cream filling and lemon ganache topping. 

Plain whipped cream filling that contains banana liqueur and vanilla extract and a small amount of confectioner's sugar, but with all that still plain. So plain you need a lot extra on the side to convince yourself that, yes, this whipped cream really is plain.

Lemon flavored icing with butter and banana liqueur.

Cherry preserves.

The cake is delicious, faintly flavored with banana liqueur and vanilla and lemon.

The whipped cream filling is delicious, faintly flavored with banana liqueur and vanilla and lemon.

The lemon ganache is fairly strongly flavored and with a trace of banana liqueur.

All three things are delicious separately

And horrible together. Flat horrible. 

I do not like these things one single bit and I wouldn't offer them to anybody. They simply cannot be justified. Maybe they go well with coffee, I don't know, I don't like coffee either. Just thinking about cake and coffee makes me want to brush my teeth. 

Heket salad

Pond salad or Heket salad. 

It's a beneficial practice to garnish with something that indicates what is inside so there will be no unpleasant surprises. For example a few peanuts might be placed on the edge of a plate as a signal the salad contains a potentially dangerous allergen, or a strawberry to indicate flavor and so forth.  

Heqet, the frog goddess of rain, birth, harvest and such

H is the twisted rope. The kind of "h" that gurgles in the throat like the Scottish word "loch".

Q is the cutaway view of a mountain. It's the "k" sounding kind of "q" so then Heqet is also spelled Heket. 

T is the half circle, known as a loaf of bread, the sound "t" also means bread, but this sign is believed by some to represent the primordial mound and not bread.

Seated woman is determinative for goddess, frog would work also to signify specifically the sound spelled out by the symbols for h q t  means the frog goddess and not something else. 

Salad with roasted red bell pepper, meat ball

This would be excellent for a light dinner party. A simple salad with two things in it with lettuce, homemade honey/mustard vinaigrette, and a smaller plate with a meatball and toasted bread with an insignificant pile of angel hair spaghetti. So reversed from the usual arrangement of entree and salad. 

The handmade dressing is easy as opening a bottle of prepared dressing, times four. 

In my case easier than that even because my olive oil and my rice vinegar have pour spouts not screw on tops.

* olive oil, the larger ring

* rice vinegar, light and nearly sweet, the ring inside the oil ring

* honey, splotch next to the mustard

* mustard, homemade from powder the best because it add so much that regular prepared mustard does not, but if not, then not to worry, prepared mustard is fine

* salt and pepper but that doesn't count for opening things

This avocado is soft and now it's protected from oxygen and can sit there without going dark.

These red bell peppers are sitting in hot oil and salted. Situated so a flat surface of each piece is touching the pan and they're left alone to burn slightly on one side. 

Red bell pepper strips are good by themselves as a side, they're wonderful that way, blackened in spots and heated through, oiled and salted, with a few drops of vinegar or lemon and they're even better.

The salad can hold like this until service. Vegetables protected in dressing and the delicate lettuce on top protected from dressing. 

The meatball is incidental but delicious, unauthentic but better than you'll get outside, fast and careless but satisfying as languidly marinated Old World approach. It's a meat loaf in miniature, larger than a golf ball, a meal.

A guest made the meatballs by my instructions while I made the salad and toast. 

The sauce is quite fast from spices in oil, tomato paste, and tinned tomato.

This meal is tested with other people twice and they both raved.

Both times the guests effused over the dressing, which is remarkably simple to pull off, so one is given undeserved credit for discovering something that's already in plain sight.

Win. 

Bread stuffing, gravy

Regular white bread