Archive for the ‘Host a series of dinner parties’ Category
Noms, the making of
M and I hosted a ten-course dinner party at our flat last mid-winter. Then-named “The Tank,” the condo is a little more than 600 sq.ft. Part of the challenge was to seat eleven people to comfortably dine; the other part had to do with cooking for said eleven people. The kitchen is sized Standard Yuppie: big enough to barely store wine glasses, and they pretty much just expect you to store your dress shirts, not noms, in the fridge.
We drank over ten bottles of wine and ate delicious leg of lamb and garlic-butter Brussels sprouts. Then we opened up the party and drank more mulled wine and spirits and warmed up by the fire amid a fierce snowstorm that started near the end of desserts (Typsy laird). We were lucky that most of the decorations that K put up managed to stay up… It got rowdy.
A few weeks ago we did it again to celebrate mid-autumn. We invited another mix of good friends and ate and drank and were merry. We had two chickens (and made yummy, yummy stock from the carcasses afterward, some of which still lays tantalisingly frozen, biding its time for a Chicken Noodle Soup Day), spanakopita, and a great début for a new recipe for bite-sized caramel apples. After supper, we cut open fresh fruits we’d picked out from the market in the morning. We didn’t get quite as rowdy but we certainly had many good conversations.
I really need to either get more efficient, or find some means of warming the food while it is being served… By the time I sat down for most courses, the food had become lukewarm. The time between courses is also haphazard at best. We served food basically whenever the food was ready. Sometimes that meant a good fifteen minute wait before the tables were cleared. Hopefully we’ll figure all this out before the winter dinner comes around again, and hopefully the solution isn’t just “get a bigger kitchen and get more pans”!
Related to this is my ambition to make and bind a book. I’d worked through the process in my art class, but I don’t feel particularly attached to the content and so am not too proud of the book. I made that book, essentially, to get a passing grade. But surely a recipe book of all my favourite recipes, perhaps with pretty photographs and heart-warming anecdotes would garner a bigger spot in my heart! So it begins. I’ve started compiling my most favourite recipes. I’m sure the stories would come naturally when I write them — good things always happen where good food goes.