Kitchen Challenge 1: Easter Dinner!

Sunday April 8
Today we flew to Philadelphia to visit Brian and Bob. It was Easter Day, and our plane didn't get in until five-ish, so we had offered to cook Easter dinner for them, us, and our friends Ann and David, provided that someone would get the groceries, as supermarkets tend to be closed on Easter. Bob upped the challenge: he would get the food, but he wouldn't tell us what it was until we arrived, and we would have to cook whatever he got.
Luckily, he chose quality stuff that wouldn't take an age to cook: a couple of gorgeous racks of lamb (hey - lamb two days in a row!), a sheaf of asparagus, some good new potatoes, and onions. Holt, as chief chef here in the department of redundancy department, roasted the vegetables in olive oil with sea salt (first potatoes, then onions on top of them, then asparagus separately), coated the lamb in a mustard, garlic, fresh rosemary, and olive oil dressing, and roasted that too. We wisely brought the perfect housewarming gift: an instant-read thermometer, so we knew when the lamb would be a perfect medium-rare. And so it was. We ate it with Bob's choice of red wines, including a yummy Chateauneuf-du-Pape; and dessert was a giant chocolate fish, brought by Ann and David. An Easter feast we won't forget.