The Dump Dinner!

Meet my sister Eileen Lovett (above). She's the one who made the optical illusion selvage quilt that you saw here yesterday. Eileen is the queen of creativity and fun. She actually owns two copies of the Fun Encyclopedia. She could have written it! Take a look at what we did for dinner Saturday night at their summer house in Holderness, NH. We had a dump dinner! The name had us all pretty curious all day.

Eileen boiled several big pots of shrimp, sausage, kielbasa, white potatoes, purple potatoes(!), pearl onions, and corn on the cob. She poured off the water after it was cooked, and then "dumped" it on the center of the table. Her husband Campbell (in the white hat) served each of us a little dab of coctail sauce (ketchup and horseradish), butter, and mustard. Then we ate the delicious dinner with our hands! The funny thing was that eating like this without a plate, I didn't really know exactly how much I ate. Twelve of us didn't finish all this. We had covered the table with a plastic tablecloth, then newspapers, and finally aluminum foil, so the clean up phase took just a minute. Everyone volunteered to wash the dishes. Eileen made blueberry pie for dessert, and fortunately we got plates and forks for that!

After dinner we all played a game called "Apples to Apples" and we laughed so much that our faces hurt. It was dark for a long time by the time we left the table. Then I sat outside under the stars and enjoyed the sound of the crickets. I love evenings like this.

In case you're curious, in the bottom photo you can see our other sister Lynne in the pink shirt on the left. Next to her is her son Oliver, then our brother Bruce's wife Jennifer, Sam in the "Halftime" tee-shirt (he's one of Eileen and Campbell's two sons), Michelle (Bruce and Jennifer's niece), Amelia (Lynne's daughter) is standing, and Campbell is on the far right. Our mom, Mary, is standing in the photo at the top. Not shown: Bruce, my husband Jason and me. I was taking the photos.