Happy 4th!

To celebrate the 4th of July we had a few friends over and cooked up some good ol' American favorites.
The menu was as follows:

• Deviled eggs - first time we'd tried this one. came out mmmmm
• Spinach and onion dip and many veggies
• Potato chips - didn't even get the crazy Chinese flavors, but stuck with classics and BBQ flavor and Sour Cream and Onion in honor of this fine holiday
• Vegetarian stew and wheat bread - What, you didn’t see this at your picnic?
• Buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing - more on this later
• Greek salad - so maybe not so American, but tastes really good
• Lemon pie - Thank you Sarah!
• Chocolate no bake cookies
• Watermelon
• And beer of course

One of the funny things in preparing for this meal is that we needed mayonnaise for a few dishes (blue cheese dressing the deviled eggs to be precise.) It is apparently possible to buy it in some of the local stores, (as we learned while serving the food described above. Better late than never) but we didn't know where and it turns out that Joy of Cooking has a recipe for it... so we made our own. This is an interesting process and a stand mixer is VERY useful. Not sure that it tasted anything like the store bought stuff and it is definitely not white since it is made with egg yolks, but it did seem to do the job.

Another fun new item was the chicken wings. One of our guests informed us that he has tried most of the wings available in Beijing and they are pretty uniformly bad. Today though, he was finally satisfied. I thought Michael was overestimating when he recommended we get about 90 wings for 6 adults, but since we only have about 20 left, and that's with serving the wings after all the other non-dessert food was served. If you want to try to make them, check out this site at Recipe Zaar.

Only thing we were missing was fire works which is sort of surprising considering how easy they are to get most of time.

Hope everyone in the US is enjoying the holiday!