Self-Taught Homework #14: You almost cancel everything, then evolve into a dinner-party type
The grand finale of one of your favorite experiments.
You apologize for this coming later than Sunday. You’ve been pushing off the end of this project as long as you can, because you want to end it on the right note, and you’re sad to say goodbye to it. Thank you to you, the subscribers, for kindly reading and sending recipes for three months. This project’s wonder comes from the individual act of cooking and the digitally primal response to cooking through a words on a screen. You wish that you all could be in one room eating a crown roast together. Week after week, each essay has been its own improvised recipe, a welcome into your mental kitchen, and you appreciate the hospitality of the subscribers for letting you into their inboxes. (Though this post is too long for email and better opened in a browser.) You hope you’ve enjoyed.
You always wanted to be a contemporary dinner-party-type.
What does that even mean?
You have no idea.
The watercolor shadows of a contemporary host-cook lean toward a bright room of white tablecloths, pink flowers with long and green stems, browned food. The vibe is casual and warm. Summer sun cuts through the windows and portions the spread into rectangles of light. The host has an Audrey Hepburn sense: good posture, a well-volumed bun, a knowing smile. The wooden tables are sturdy and long. The dishes are mismatched china, cobbled together from a careful search of thrift stores, a selective process of this one but not that set. Guests hold ice-cool crystal tumblers or floral teacups of lemonade or wine. The Hepburn conduit carves a roasted bird with crisp skin. Her hands, outside of the dining setting, are neatly manicured with a magic sense to detect the right way to vase flowers, how to garden, how to tell if a steak is done with a poke of a finger painted in creamy colors. Everyone is full and laughing, and the music plays.
Probably something like that.
After spending your last week plotting a menu and planning a meal over the course of three days and narrowly putting it together before your guests arrive on Sunday, you went to the movies and saw The Taste of Things. This movie about a brilliant gastronomist and his personal chef who have built a twenty-year, loving relationship through food. It opens with a 40-minute scene showing the household prepare a four-course meal.
It made movie-theater butter taste bad as they stock and baste and stir and fillet. That, you think, is the world you want to create for yourself.
With one dinner party for 14 people under your belt, you’re not there yet.
But you’ve hosted, and you’ve hosted more people than you ever hosted before.
That’s a step.
Two months after you and your boyfriend moved to Brooklyn, a 40 minute commute to your closest friend in Brooklyn, your boyfriend gifted you a pasta maker and a trapezoidal slab of wood for charcuterie plating. “So you can host parties,” he offered.
It is one of the sweetest gifts that you rarely use.
Ultimately, 40 minutes is a guilt trip, and you apologize as soon as a friend steps in the door for making them come all the way out to visit you. The guests eat and eat the pasta or soup you made to make sure they don’t go home hungry, that they don’t have to pay for a takeout dinner when they get home. Once they eat, their bowls in their laps on your couch, everyone can relax.
Given this opportunity to unabashedly throw a dinner party—it’s part of your writing now! it’s your primary responsibility this week!—you don’t know how or when to tell yourself to stop.
Your perfectionism flares up like a rash when you plot out the menu. This stage alone takes you Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then Wednesday of finding recipes, imagining the flavors and textures and courses together, plotting a schedule to determine the feasibility to cook all of this, then sourcing friends’ opinions and revising one last time.
This ended up being your final option:
Your Menu
Appetizers
2 focaccias: one with red onion, one with honeyed apples
3 dips: a whipped lemon feta, a smoked salmon dip, and mushroom duxelle (the jammy component of the Beef Wellington you made)
Peperonata (bell peppers simmered with tomatoes, garlic, and oil) and burrata
Raw and roasted vegetables for dipping
Cheese and prosciutto spread
Mains
Beets and grapefruit with pickled shallots and a butter sauce (from Vegetable Week & Carla Lalli Music’s When Cooking Begins)
Chicories with garlic bread croutons, chosen primarily for the croutons (also from When Cooking Begins)
Tomato parmesan soup (per Julian’s recommendation after floundering over lasagna or pasta fagioli)
Green goddess salad with tortellini (once made for a group of eight on a beach vacation; this year you plan on making them the cheesesteaks)
Dessert
The sopapilla cheesecake bars (from Baking Week)
Penn State Creamery ice cream (with optional espresso for affogados)
Why these dishes?
Though you roasted a turkey for Thanksgiving, you never roasted a chicken (ironically, learning this was one of the largest motivations for starting the series), and you didn’t want to learn on the fly how to roast two or three simultaneously for your guests. That said, the carving component felt too showy. You can’t tell if it’s dry until you pull it out of the oven. And you didn’t want to get stuck with a dry breast while someone else got the tender, juicy thigh or drumstick, that’s unfair!
You felt the same about beef or pork. Those felt insane to try, for the first time, to find a cut and a recipe for 14 people. The ability for things to go sideways was too high and expensive.
A soup and salad was easy to make in advance, especially with your Dutch oven. (That Dutch oven since Christmas has been put to work like a real member of the kitchen appliance family.) The pasta fagioli probably would’ve been a great substitution, but the last time you made it, you made it for two guests who were going to be at this dinner party, and you wanted to show them something new. (In retrospect, that was unnecessary pressure.)
The focaccia you felt confident with after you and Luke had made four or so.
A lot of these items also felt like they could be purchased as is, from a store-bought cheese to crudité. I wouldn’t have to churn my own butter to validate that.
With all that careful consideration, you procrastinate.
You originally planned to buy your ingredients on Thursday morning to bake the sopapillas and a dip or two ahead of the weekend.
You don’t do that at all.
You can’t remember what you did alternatively, but it must not have been as important.
Oh, oh right.
That morning, you were accepted into an MFA program. You tell only a few people, because you’re scared to jinx it. It’s in another city, and you don’t know if you’re going to enroll, or if you are going to move, and you don’t want to freak people out.
So crying, that was what you were doing. Good crying, though.
Plans: cancelled.
Friday: You speed date local grocery stores
When Friday morning rolls around, the productivity itch consumes your thoughts. Time is running out to be prepared ahead of time. Grocery shopping had to happen Friday morning, or your whole weekend might go sideways.
In your neighborhood, there are three grocery stores along 5th Avenue within a five to eight minute walk from your apartment. They all have the rough lay-out and inventory of a city supermarket. Their names evoke sentimental agrarian oases, like “Metropolitan Garden” or “Farmer’s City Wagon,” maybe so you can overlook that the produce has all gone soft.
You stop at one of these stores (Market Place). Even though you have imported recipes, then a grocery list based on these recipes for what you need, into an app, your brain fuzzes as soon as you lap around the garlic and onion stand near the automated sliding door.
This short circuiting, usually associated with a five-second attention span limitation and a light buzzing in your ears, happens when you’re overwhelmed.
You grab some ingredients—feta cheese, crescent rolls, cream cheese—but tell yourself you don’t need to grab everything. Instead, you fixate on cans of smoked salmon in oil. It’s not among the tuna cans, though there are huge cans of pink salmon stored in water. Not the same, you imagine. If they don’t have this, what else might they not have?
Certain ingredients you reserve for the farmer’s market—beets, raw veggies, chicories—and this also confuses your list. What should be grabbed now? What should wait?
Wandering to the grocery store next door (Prospect Market), the canned smoked salmon in oil escapes you again. A Google search informs you that this is a Whole Foods purchase, and now you’re worried. (For all your fantasies of culinary success, Whole Foods is a place you refuse to let yourself feel comfortable with. That is not in your budget, and you already have an issue with over-buying condiments and spices.) You pick up olive oil, bell peppers, asparagus, carrots, and green beans.
With two cloth bags of food, you’ve just gotten started.
You and your boyfriend drive to pick up the table and chair rentals for the 14 people you invited, then you get out of the car to walk to a third place (Bad Wife) where you found barley syrup to make bagels weeks ago. Thank goodness, they have the smoked salmon.
You almost stop into a fourth place (Union Market).
But you just end up going there after work to pick up odd onions and shallots and scallions and bread and a special combined goat/cow cheese and Kosher salt—after three stores, you’re still out of salt!
That weekend, your boyfriend invited one of your friends from Philly to stay for the weekend, and they’re out on Friday night. You spend the night in the quiet apartment, listening to your music, whipping together dips, roasting vegetables. After spending all day at the grocery store, you could afford some time alone. You had a full (draining) getaway date with every supermarket in a ten minute walking radius.
Growing up in a house with five other kids, your parents, and a dog or two, you were lucky you had your own room and could escape. In middle school, you liked doing your homework in the sanctity of your bedroom, but in high school, when you started the habit of doing homework through dinner, you set up your station at the breakfast bar where you bath in the noise of your family while chest deep in pre-calculus equations. After the rest of your siblings slept and the house quieted, you would still be at the breakfast bar until midnight, savoring the night hours because of the fullness of the louder evenings.
Soon, 1 a.m. rolls around again. The fridge has cleared space for three dips, an oily peperonata, and two proofing focaccias.
You pour yourself a glass of red wine and fall asleep watching True Detective around 1:30.
Perhaps this is the realistic Friday of a dinner-party-type’s social life.
Saturday: You get picky, then arrogant
You wake up earlier than you’d like with the heavy feet of someone who has something to do.
You set off with a fever pitch to the Fort Greene farmer’s market.
When you arrive, you realize that the beauty of something like a farmer’s market welcoming real crops from real farmer’s is you don’t know what you’re gonna get.
Turns out that late February is not a super lush time for farmed produce.
The farmer’s market has scallops, turkey, beef, bread, potatoes, and surprisingly, apples. You pull your hat low as you do a lap. One of your old bosses lives in this neighborhood. You once had to run an errand from her door to Crown Heights (almost an hour walk). The pathetic and embarrassing thing is you imagine what you would say if you bumped into her. You’d say, “Oh, hi! I’m doing okay, actually—going to host a huge dinner party, been doing this series where I’m learning to cook…I’ve been doing great!” And this woman would stammer and avoid eye contact and do her best to end the conversation, at least that’s what she does in your head. Then the imaginary conversation gets off the tracks, you pin her like an ant under a magnifying glass, and you hurl backhanded, Fort-Greene-appropriate insults at her with your arms full of nutrition to feed your friends. You leave her in your dust. End scene!
It’s probably best that you leave soon if the farmer’s market is making you petty.
The other farmer’s market patrons are glacial, accompanied by puffer-wearing babies walking into strangers’ knees. Over text, your friend Vasu talks about the apartment she and her boyfriend were accepted to last night. She lists the good elements, feels guilt that she was accepted to the first apartment she applied to in a New York housing market.
You tell her not to worry about the details, that there will never be a perfect apartment, as you pivot your search to your seventh food venue.
You reach the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market and find more potatoes, more apples, and more poultry. There are more options here, and you’re relieved. You pick up some arugula, spinach, radishes, a vacuum-sealed pre-cooked duck breast that tastes hammy, and six beets each as big as your hand. You’re uncomfortable, at best, speaking to vendors. You never know what the right questions are.
To the argula lady and the duck man, you say something like, “I’m hosting a dinner party tonight” (though it’s tomorrow), and they give a weak “Nice” or “Good luck!” That’s not a question, for the record. (What are you even supposed to be asking at the farmer’s market? “Is this in season?” “Is this actually yummy, or is it just what you have?”)
Your search is finally over. You meet your boyfriend and your friend at a diner for an omelette and burnt coffee with several packets of room temperature cream.
Well, your search isn’t really over.
The difference is you now know what you couldn’t get from a farmer’s market, so you have to fill those gaps—tortellini for the pasta salad, canned tomatoes for the soup, a chicory substitute.
In retrospect, you spent as much, if not more, time shopping for ingredients as you did cooking.
Once you’re back in the kitchen, settled in the idea that everything is here now, you get into it.
You dice onions for the tomato soup and remember how this was one of your first questions: how do you even slice an onion? Your horizontal slices aren’t parallel, they diagonal and make the pieces uneven, but that first chop across, the one where the cubes fall from the onion into a deconstructed mountain, is earned excitement.
The food processor is decidedly retired. This brand new, four-cup food processor was a gift you got yourself with a Christmas Amazon gift card, and it died last night whipping feta. The manual said it might need time alone, unplug it and come back to it in 15 minutes, but this food processor is past cold shouldering and far into ghosting you when it still won’t turn on the next day.
You turn to your enemy: your boyfriend’s Hamilton Beach protein shake blender to mix your green goddess dressing.
You stuff chopped herbs and Greek yogurt into the blender, then it also shorts out, its blades tangled in the greenery. What good are the blades if they don’t actually work! It’s a meathead with showy muscles who can’t lift anything heavy!
The immersion blender calls to you from the lower cabinet—another Christmas present—and it blends everything from freckled white to minty green in seconds. It purées your tomato soup. You redeem your salsa verde explosion from your knife skills week.
As the focaccia loaves swell in slick pans, you shower, dry your hair, put on makeup. You feel okay about your progress here. When the doughs still feel cold to the touch when you’d like to be out the door, around 8 p.m., you decide to leave them out until you come back. Maybe you’ll bake them at the end of the night.
Today, you made a whole soup, made a green goddess dressing and poured it over tortellinis, peeled and trimmed and cut six huge beets, roasted veggies, and bought all the remaining ingredients to throw the finnicky last-minute produce recipes together tomorrow.
The focaccia recipe calls for an hour of air time before baking, but you have cooked almost everything, and you feel invincible.
Invincible enough to stay out until 4 a.m. at a bar with a house shot called “ass juice.” When people ask about the party the next day, you say it should be fine, you should be ready…then knock on the wooden table.
Sunday: You almost cancel the whole thing
In the morning, your body jolts awake at 9 a.m. after five hours of sleep. When you convince yourself you have time to go back to sleep, your thoughts race about the focaccia, the garlic bread croutons, the rental tables in your boyfriend’s car, the Target tablecloths wrapped in plastic.
Face it, you’re awake now.
You stand up and go to your kitchen, which is also your living room, which is also where your friend sleeps on your couch.
The focaccia you left out with the ambition that you would just bake it once you got home?
It’s room temperature. It’s grown to double its size as it’s supposed to. But it has an air-dried crust to its edges.
This is your first sign.
No matter. You’re enamored with your idea for a sweet focaccia with cinnamon and honey. As you drop red onion arcs and peeled garlic cloves onto one dough and sprinkle cinnamon over apple chunks on another, you name the apple dough “the sweet talker” and the onion-garlic one “the close talker.” This makes you laugh while everyone else sleeps.
Then the dough taste dense and don’t fluff up.
You flew too close to the sun. And now, you’re panicking.
How terrible would it be to cancel?
It’s a flying thought, but one that you have to at least entertain, especially in the spirit of hospitality.
Your boyfriend and your friend run out to get a coffee and a smoothie to fix their hangovers, and the Hangover Helper smoothie they come back to give you is lethally red with beets. As you cook and sip on beets, your head spins. How is this going to happen? What were you thinking inviting 14 people in an apartment that can comfortably fit six max? Are people going to leave hungry?
Though you had planned out this week and this menu to be done by yourself with limited help, you are outnumbered by your chores. People may show up at 5, and there won’t be anywhere for them to sit.
You phone a friend.
Vasu shows up around 3 p.m. to prep, chop, mix, decorate, and grab an alternative bread. Meanwhile, still hungover, your boyfriend and visiting friend (roped into chores like a bad playdate) pivot the couch up the stairs into your lofted bedroom, then grab the tables and chairs from the car to bring them up five flights of stairs.
When Vasu arrives with two loaves of bread, she steams your table cloths, makes miniature flower arrangements with Martinelli’s apple juices you saved and a bouquet sent from your friend Rachel across state lines, slices the cheeses and meats and plates them.
You’re making a same-day focaccia, mixing a salad dressing for the kale croutons, and transferring dips to serving bowls, wiping out the Pyrex bowls you’ll use as soup bowls and hiding their lids.
Your brain turns on and off and on again, often so you forget what you’re doing in the middle of the task. The boys set the table with the napkins, run out to grab more olive oil and wine and extra tortellinis as you drive yourself sick thinking there may not be enough food.
You pull out the beets you prepped the day before to sear them, you slice and juice grapefruits, you combine them with pickled shallots. Beets and grapefruit salad? Done. Slower than you’d like, but done.
You toast slices of bread in the oven, tear them with your hands, mix them with parmesan, oregano, and red pepper to form croutons. (You never found chicories in a quantity that made sense, so you bought two bags of kale on a final trip.) Garlic bread croutons and salad? Needs to be dressed, but otherwise done.
For the green goddess pasta salad, you hold on adding the arugula and spinach to the heavy tortellini to avoid wilting the meal. (Fast forward: guests arrive, you forget to mix all of these elements together, and you forget to serve the whole dish. Turns out you didn’t need it, and no one asked questions.)
Around 4:45 p.m., everything starts to come together. Vasu and your friend Seth bought you candlesticks, and Vasu handcrafted menus for diner’s plates. One friend brought wine from the country Georgia, one brought prosciutto and salami since the night before, mid-knocking on wood, you expressed how you didn’t have enough protein on the menu. Your cousin commuted with a baked brie in a Pyrex dish. The cats hide upstairs in a mountain of laundry near your newly placed couch and only come down.
Vasu, as people come in with olives or Modelos, finds a dish in your cabinet and plates it for you as you’re talking to your friends, forgetting that you have to direct this ship, tell people when to sit, ladle the soup into the bowls and pass around the salads. Vasu quietly comes up to you and grabs the homemade dressing for the kale salad and sprinkles it through, which you also forgot to do. In your machinations on an ideal dinner party, you never imagined the ghost help of guests who operate to tidy, clean, mix, and serve the dishes of your abstract dinner.
So much of this planning has been so interior, so stuck in your own head, that it feels like a relief to let other people in. When they arrive, they’re no longer seats at a imaginary table but your friends with good humor, wine, and a reverence for the table spread. You forget to tell everyone to please, please eat.
When they whisper then half-chant for a speech from you, after the soup bowls are cleared and the ice cream pulled from the freezer, you’re speechless. You’re just grateful and relieved, and you are quietly wishing you could do it all again.
Things you would (and will) do differently next time:
Use Instacart to consolidate one list and get the basic ingredients handled.
Do a potluck where other people bring dishes.
Don’t trust the prep times listed on ingredients, especially if you’re scaling the recipes.
Consolidate courses for one good staple instead of doing too much: Make one large creamy dip instead of three little dips. Make one salad instead of two.
Tell people when and what they can eat, otherwise they will walk in circles around the food thinking it’s reserved for some special time.
Also, if there are things you have to throw together at the last minute to keep vegetables fresh, make sure to … do it. You had one dish that you never plated or served by accident.
Also also, taste things before you serve them. You have a mild fear that you have no idea how anything tasted because you went straight into serving without trying anything.
Move your TV console to avoid a bottleneck people can’t cross when someone sits in a chair.
Skip espresso on a Sunday night. No one needs that.
Things that worked
Asking for help and giving orders
Good and easy desserts
White linen tablecloths over the retro plastic confetti one that you thought would be cute but looked like a seven-year-old’s birthday
Having leftovers for yourself to make salads and sandwiches from during the week—lots of bread and cheese and duck breast left for joyous leftover salad that’s decadently kingly long after the party is over
I'm glad you didn't decide it was necessary to get new dish towels, plates, serving spoons, curtains, and a sofa... it sounded perfect, and don't underappreciate having such good friends to share this experience and hard work. Wonderful job. xo