Neatballs, Buns, and Rachel

Rachel and Peter stopped by as I was fixing dinner.  They and their boys are dear friends to our family - and they are moving far away this summer.  I'm sad about it, it's true, even though I can be happy for them in a little part of my selfish heart.

But I appeared to be a kitchen goddess when they dropped in - had an oven full of vegetarian neatballs, baked potatoes, and hamburger buns.  I've decided that I'm bypassing the choice of grocery store sales or nasty cheap buns by making buns myself, so I took advantage of a cool-ish day and an oven supper to make the buns.

I asked my husband to take a picture of Rachel and me; he told us to say "buns" which, we discovered, made us look very strange.

The neatballs, a new recipe to me, were fantastic.  I'm already planning other menus around them and thinking of people I want to share them with.  We ate them with baked potatoes and steamed broccoli.

My children are in love with baked-potato-skin cups, the way we ate baked potatoes when I was a child.  I scrub baking potatoes, poke them once, and bake them for an hour.

Then we cut the potatoes in half, hollow out the skin, and put the fluffy potato on the plate.  Put a pat of butter, salt and pepper in the little potato-skin cup and that is heaven!  Is there a name for this?

 Formerly, I oiled the potatoes and put them on a tray so their skins would be soft and I wouldn't be cooking in foil.  However, I shyly introduced this childhood method of my mother's and we are all hooked.

A serving dish from my late Grandma Weaver