Father's Day dinner

For Father's Day, I decided on a home-cooked dinner instead of a restaurant. One reason was cost - a home-cooked meal obviously costs less. And since it was a joint effort with my younger brother, this fits his budget better, because he hasn't started working yet.

This was our menu:

Prawn bisque

Baby spinach salad with parma ham, alfafa sprouts, mini potatoes, cherry tomatoes, and portobello mushrooms, mixed with honey mustard sauce

Mixed grill - chicken chop, cheese sausages, fried egg, sirloin steak, lamb cutlet

Ice cream

My brother handled the prawn bisque, while I settled the salad and main course. The salad was quite easy - basically, after washing and preparing the ingredients, I just mixed them together with honey mustard sauce I took from Quiznos Subs.  

For the mixed grill, I marinated the meats rather simply. The chicken chops, after removing the fat, were marinated with lime, salt and black pepper. For the beef steaks, it was just sea salt and black pepper. The lamb cutlets were done the same way as the beef, but with some extra rosemary leaves.

Now comes the troublesome part - the pan-frying. While it wasn't difficult, the amount of oil that sizzled and splashed on the stove, wall and floor was... urgh. The chicken was the main culprit - I think it accounted for 80% of it! So the cleaning up after that was really a headache. 

The prawn bisque turned out pretty good - it was very rich, definitely much richer than any prawn bisque  I had tasted outside. It was a good decision to buy the better quality prawns at the wet market this morning.

So how much did this meal cost? $60 for everything, so it worked out to be only $15 per person. A meal like this at a restaurant would probably cost more than twice as much.