First night cooking for guests!

Today we were excited to finally cook for our first guests of the summer.  We got an early start again, and had a pretty easy time getting everything ready the way we wanted it (and on time, too!).  After a few cancellations, our dinner count was ~13 guests + 8 staff.

 Cucumber and Avocado Gazpacho
This was actually meant for a few nights ago, but since it was so ridiculously cold out we decided to save it for a day like today which was hot and humid.  This was a really simple recipe that was fun to prepare.  It seemed to work out pretty well, as we had to bring out a second portion for everyone.  We made 8x that recipe, and the quantity worked well.  We forgot to document its glorious appearance before sending it to the table.

 Lemon Pepper Chicken
We prepared 24 breasts, using the marinade from this recipe, letting it rest in marinade for ~60min (would do overnight next time) and then baking in a 350F oven for about 30 minutes until the inside of the fatter breasts was reading ~150F.  It was delicious, and we had only 3 breasts leftover.

Oven-Roasted Asparagus
We had 4 bunches of beautiful fresh asparagus, which we prepared according to this recipe.  Good!

White Rice
We meant to do brown, but forgot about it until it was too late for brown, but thankfully still in time for white.  Whew!

Flourless Chocolate Cake with Penuche Icing
We made 2 cakes following this recipe, and had a tiny bit of the first cake and the whole second one leftover.  Since we didn't have "bittersweet chocolate", we used half unsweetened baking chocolate, and half semisweet chocolate chips, by weight.  The penuche icing was from a Stetson family recipe, similar to this one, and was a big hit.  We studded the cakes with chocolate chips to make them look more awesome, and that went pretty well, too.