We went to the St. Francis of Asisi crab feast in Baltimore again. It was fantastic. They had a new caterer this year, which may be why the crabs seemed plumper and the side dishes were tastier. Zim Zemelman and his orchestra were replaced by some new dame, but the monsignor still played the trombone, and the guy with the big moustache spun the wheel of fortune (Peter won big at the liquor wheel!). And of course there was a crazy lady stuffing crabs in her purse–there’s always one.
Category: Parties
The Anti-Restaurants
Since last week was Blog Black Hole Week, I’m only now catching up….
There was an article, “The Anti-Restaurants,” on bad-ass supper clubs in the New York Times last week.
Initially I was miffed that Tamara and I didn’t get our due for five long years of culinary cool (we were roasting whole lambs on spits when those boar-butchering brats were in diapers!). As usual, as the media usually tells it, all the action is in Brooklyn. Whatev.
But then I got to the very end of the story, and read this:
As she was packing her knives, Ms. Lombard, the professional caterer, gave the dinner a grade of C-. She came as a friend and unpaid helper to learn molecular gastronomy techniques but instead wound up doing everything from washing dishes to taking out the trash. “When this last course comes out,” she said toward the end of her 12-hour shift, “I’m going to go to McDonald’s and get a Big Mac with extra pickles.”
So, basically, Brooklyn’s underground supper-club scene is totally freakin’ rad…but the food sucks? Interesting premise.
Now I’m relieved Sunday Night Dinner (Sometimes on Saturday, or Friday, or Even Wednesday) was not mentioned at all. Not the greatest company, you know? Because SNDSSFEW does A++++ food, goddamnit, and we don’t make Jell-O out of pot liquor (see earlier in the story for this particularly vile idea).
Just sign me,
Keepin’ It Real in Queens
White People Love Dinner Parties!
Stuff White People Like gave a shoutout to dinner parties recently. With 743 comments and counting, it seems to have struck a special chord.
This is either bad for my professional future (I am engaging in something that everyone is about to be _totally over_), or it’s really really good–I mean, there are tons of white people in the world, right? And a lot of them need me and Tamara to tell them how to have dinner parties.
First, of course, we’d tell them that they don’t have to worry about most of the crap mentioned in the SWPL post. In fact, leave out the Us Weekly! My god–what kind of beasts would scour their house clean of Us Weekly to impress their friends? They need new friends!
Sunday Night Dinner Flipbook: The Classy One
Because Peter isn’t as much a fan of found art as I am, he went on to tinker with the flipbook.
OK, fine, so it no longer threatens to give you a seizure–I _guess_ that’s an improvement. Still…I liked the simple insta-elegance of the first one–well, if you can call me sticking my whole avocado-covered hand in my mouth elegant.
Here’s the link to New Improved Sunday Night Dinner a la Mexicana Flipbook.
Sunday Night Dinner Flipbook Action
File under Found Art:
Last Sunday, Karl took 526 photos. (That’s a lot, but not a lot more than he usually takes.)
Peter strung it together with his movie-maker software, and added a little sound loop.
(It’s 8MB–takes a sec to load.)
(What we made, if you’re curious: guacamole–with Mexican avocados, of course; jicama sprinkled with chile and salt–that’s what the French-fry-looking-things are; sopes with goat cheese and salsa roja–the little fried guys; chicken broth with mushrooms and epazote; duck legs with red mole; wild rice; steamed purslane and chayote; Caesar salad; flambe bananas with chocolate sauce, which wound up being the nastiest-looking dessert ever. Spaten provided the beer–classy!)
Me in the New York Post
Despite the fact that I miscomplimented the reporter on the “Unfitney!” headline (that was the brilliant work of a competing local tabloid w/r/t Brit’s loss of custody), I still came out looking fairly OK in this article on supper clubs in today’s New York Post. (Lucky I didn’t have to get my picture taken underneath a table.) A good, informative article about the trend, seeing how I actually am too busy at SND to go to other people’s parties.
[[Criticism of misspelling of my name redacted. Web publishing is miraculous!]]
Baltimore Crab Feast Photos
Formative Dinner Parties
The other night I realized that the guy who runs a blog about Syria that I read frequently is actually the very same person I maintained an eight-hour-crush on at a dinner party in London in 1995. He had long, curly red hair then, and knew about the Middle East, which was part of the reason for the crush.
The other reason for the crush was the party itself, which still stands out in my mind as a model for a brilliant night at home. I don’t remember the food, except for the fact that the blowsy British hostess was cheerfully serving us canned Tesco tomato soup, and she got so drunk that she actually fell down in the kitchen while she was doing it. Actually, I suppose I’ve conflated those memories, because what was nice about the dinner was the slow pace–the hostess got up to cook the next course only when we were done with the current one. So I guess she probably fell down while she was fixing dessert? A technicality.
Falling down drunk and canned soup are horrific dinner-party no-nos in the US, and I do try to avoid them myself. But when I feel myself getting a little too uptight about cooking dinner for people, I actively remind myself about this particular British dinner, which was so much more about a bunch of grad students sitting around bullshitting by candlelight and drinking wine until our teeth were deadly gray than it was about the tastiness of the food.
An even earlier formative dinner party came when I was just a sophomore in college, and my not-really-anymore-because-he’d-graduated-boyfriend invited me to NYC to spend the weekend at his friends’ apartment in Brooklyn with him. This was in 1991, before a lot of people had gotten used to saying “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” out loud. I took the train up with another not-yet-graduated friend of the larger crew, and followed her off the subway, down the shady block in Boerum Hill and up the winding staircase in the old brownstone. Dinner was delicious and eaten in a cramped dining room with a happily-reunited crowd packed around a tiny table–as the youngest and most peripheral of the bunch, I felt lucky to be there.
I still make the salad we had that night, with slices of red pepper and dried currants, and it still makes me think I’m adventurous and grown-up. Never mind that the next day was technically a reversion to college–White Castle hamburgers while watching Dune, the movie–we also consoled my not-anymore-boyfriend about his car getting broken into, and that felt edgy and grown-up.
Truth be told, the really formative dinner parties were the ones my parents had, which were exactly the same kind of thing. Candles would melt down into waxy pools on the table, the grown-ups would starting talking extra loud, and I do remember one person falling down, while carrying about twenty plates–not easy to forget. And the food was always special in some way.
But I couldn’t just spring into the world and do exactly what my parents did. Everybody knows that would be totally lame. I had to follow in the footsteps of people just slightly older–and a lot cooler–than me.
And fortunately I had that model, because I guess a lot of people don’t. Or they have their own brief phase of wine drinking and kitchen experimentation, and then it slips away when the primary crew disperses. I’ve been fortunate to have always had friends who got this general concept of fun (duh–that’s why they’re my friends), but I guess that’s not surprising, since I hung out in grad school for a while and then was pretty broke for a long time in New York. Just like it took me until last year to buy a piece of actual firsthand furniture, I still have not shed the habit of saying, “Let’s just stay in for dinner–it’ll be cheaper.” Even though at this point it wouldn’t kill me to pay to eat in a restaurant.
Of course the friend who liked my style and ran with it most has been Tamara, and Sunday Night Dinners are very often an exercise in “Oh well–there’s always wine” but with the best possible results. I don’t think anyone has even been injured in four years!
So, a belated toast to Ariel K., whose idea I think that red-pepper salad was, and to Name-Forgotten Tesco-Heater-Upper. You made me the (sloppy, in a good way) hostess I am today.
The Debut of the One-Ass Kitchen!
OMG! Tamara has been sitting on a blog domain for years, and now there’s something on it: Check out the One-Ass Kitchen!
It’s nice that she has done this, because I’ve pretty much stopped covering our Sunday Night Dinners, since they all go so swimmingly and don’t really yield the sort of dramatic stories that our early cooking ventures did. But trust me, they’re still a good time.
Also, I highly recommend watching this–it’s the demo we did for our so-far-undiscovered-genius TV show last fall. Good music!
Lahspers
When he was little, my brother called lobsters “lahspers.” I’m not sure why he was even talking about them, though, because we lived in New Mexico, where there are no sea critters to be found. There was a Long John Silver’s, and that was it.
But I had the real thing over New Year’s, and maybe it’s due to my landlocked upbringing, but damn, those fuckers are delicious.
And I do say “fuckers” because my hands are still covered with tiny, painful nicks and jabs from where the shell gouged into them. But maybe that’s my fault for eating in a frenzied whirl, like a starved maniac? Maybe, also, the melted butter all over my fingers made me a little clumsy.
This was the first year I got to participate in what is now Karine’s NYE tradition in Vermont, but she’s been doing it for several years, after being faced with the challenge of a turkey deep-fryer: a big ol’ stainless-steel pot, with a temperature regulator, just begging for something to be cooked in it. She appreciated the theater of a deep-fried turkey, but wisely saw that all that dirty oil was not something she wanted to face with a hangover the next day.
Thus, the lobsters were summoned, from the northern reaches.
As a way of celebrating the new year, the lobsters seem perfect. On a superficial level, they’re the logical complement to champagne, and due to price and difficulty of eating, they have the suitable just-once-a-year feeling about them that good holiday food should have. (I know, New Englanders are scoffing right now. But for me, lobsters average out almost to once-a-decade.) They’re also a lovely bright red, the importance of which can’t be overstated in the middle of winter.
And this year, when Karine had chosen a dinner theme of “The American Apocalypto,” well, those little beasts looked just right on our plates, burnt-red as Satan’s hide, with waggly eye stalks, wiggly legs and other demonic details.
Which brings me back to the gashes all over my hands. I wouldn’t normally say getting wounded in the course of dinner is good, but this seemed like a suitable kind of penance for the utter sweetness and perfect texture of the meat.
Or maybe it’s proof that working hard for something makes you appreciate it more–which is a lesson I have to say I never internalized. While most people’s parents told them this, mine in fact told me the opposite: that just skating through is the way to go, as it makes you feel exceedingly clever. Perhaps if we’d had lobsters when I was little, I might’ve had a stronger work ethic? Perhaps if I’d eaten lobsters at every new year, I’d be inspired to actually make resolutions.
At any rate, as with the crabs in Maryland and the sea urchins in Greece, I was also reminded just how much some things don’t want to be eaten. And yet we are such ingenious humans that we now have dedicated tools for doing so: giant pots, tiny pokers, silver-plated claw-crackers, even little bibs to protect us as we gouge out the livers, like so many ancient Greek oracles. (My liver augured well for the coming year, I’m sure.)
Wait, I’m getting carried away, the music is swelling for the dramatic finale–and I didn’t even mention Julia Child! We spent all day watching old episodes of the French Chef, which, like the Muppet Show, has aged very well.
As fortune would have it, there was a lobster episode, which was sort of like Faces of Death, but for crustaceans. Luckily you’re spared the vision of 20-pound “Big Bertha” drawing her last on camera, but you do get to see Julia cheerfully put a brick (or was it an old-fashioned iron?) on top of the lid to make sure the smaller critters don’t escape their boiling torment.
So, dinner at the gates of Hell, welcomed by Julia Child–a mighty fine way to start the new year. I feel like I can handle anything now.