January: Spaghetti & Meatballs
A little background on why I should have known that this dinner party was not going to go smoothly. I decided I'd throw it over MLK weekend, so I could spend a full day getting ready for it and then still have two weekend days left over, but basically none of the people I'd wanted to invite could make it (some sort of major football situation + vacation), so instead of scrambling to find a new group, I pushed it back a weekend. And then of course I had an insane work week this week and did not think about this dinner party again until the Friday night before. I had planned to make Alison Roman's salted chocolate chunk shortbread (that took the world by storm in 2017), but I knew (vaguely in the back of my mind) that the recipe called for a hand mixer, and that I didn't have one. So Friday night, I decided to take one thing off my Saturday to-do list and I ordered a hand mixer that Amazon promised would arrive the next day. I just assumed that meant Saturday morning and it would be ready for me to use in time to make the cookie dough (and chill it for 2 hours) but that's obviously not what happened.
Sans hand mixer, I ended up making the dough in the food processor. Although everything seemed okay (and the recipe did note that the dough would be crumbly), when I checked on them after they'd been chilling, the dough had not come together at all and I knew I wasn't going to be able to cut the logs into cookies (let alone brush them in egg wash and coat them in the fancy sugar I had purchased just for this purpose). I sent Nick a panicked text asking him to pick up anything resembling dessert on his way home and shoved the logs into the freezer. Moving on.
I spent the rest of the day making my favorite spaghetti and meatballs, a hilarious Barefoot Contessa recipe for turkey meatballs that Ina just happens to add prosciutto and pork sausage to (why the turkey then? why not just really go for it?) but also relies on Rao’s marinara sauce, which I appreciate — why pretend there is anything better. I also made the Lucali salad. When Mark Iacono — the owner of Lucali, this incredible tiny pizza place in Carroll Gardens, published this recipe in the Times last year and I made it that very same weekend. It's the salad that you think you're ordering when you order a house salad at a pizza place, but never actually get. It's a super finicky recipe — count out 18 black olives, crush each of them between your thumb and forefinger, let the tomatoes sit for 2 hours, etc. Despite mocking him, I follow all of Iacono’s instruction except for his fanatic lasagna-like layering — I promise, it’s great even without that. AND I finished things off with Samin Nostrat’s herbed garlic bread recipe (also from the Times). I love Samin, and I loved how this recipe came together, it made this amazing looking bright green butter with 14 cloves of garlic cooked 2 ways, but I wasn't obsessed with how it tasted — granted, I served myself the heel, and Nick really liked it, but I've been using Carbone's garlic bread recipe for the past few years, and I think I'd stick with that in the future.
Okay, undeterred by the cookie fiasco, my other dishes were coming along nicely. I go about getting the apartment ready: I set the table for 7, I put a full roll of toilet paper in the bathroom so no one has to be the person who finishes the roll and doesn't know where to find more, light a candle in there just to make everyone comfortable (you never know), and leave enough wine glasses for everyone by the door so they can grab a glass as soon as they’ve disrobed.
15 minutes before everyone is supposed to arrive, I get a text from a couple I’d invited letting me know that one of them is sick and neither of them is coming. Except for the fact that I now have enough food for 15, and we’ll only be 5, I normally wouldn’t have worried. However, one of our single male friends is coming over and he always thinks I’m trying to set him up. And now our only other guests are two single women. I’m worried it’s going to look like a very Fiddler dinner party. I start panic texting a few people who live in the neighborhood, we knock on a neighbor's door (we have never done this before), Nick makes a few calls. Oddly enough, at 7:15 on a Saturday, no one seems free for dinner at 7:30.
Josh arrives first and I try to convince him that this dinner party was (mostly) not a secret set-up.
I put out cheeses and olives, and we open a magnum — it helps. And after all of our guests arrive, we sit down at the table to eat. The spaghetti kills (there is truly enough to feed an army), the salad is perfect, truly, and the garlic bread is…fine? But there is something about knowing you can eat as much spaghetti as you want, in the company of friends, that just works for me. We all have several servings — Nick announces to the table that he has taken off his belt to make room for serving 3.
Stuffed, everyone moves to the living room, and with their encouragement, I pop my shortbread crumbs into the oven. They sort of become something like cookie croutons, and because we have great guests, they actually eat them!
So. Not a perfect first run for 2019, but a great reminder of why I wanted to do this in the first place. It was great to have friends over who I don't always get to see, to feed them, and to know how deeply they were on my side when they ate sort of weirdly chalky cookie crumbs and told me they were delicious.
Now, off to the lobby to see if my hand mixer ever arrived…
Rundown:
Lucali Salad (make this, maybe double it)
Samin's garlic bread (make this and tell me I made it wrong because it's amazing, or try the Carbone recipe instead OR combine them? That actually might be the move)
Ina's turkey meatballs plus multiple types of pork
Alison Roman's viral shortbread
And Nick picked up a cherry pie that everyone was too full to eat and that he will happily eat for breakfast every day this week. See you in February!
Avery and Rachel tell me they really like the cookie crumbs, because they are the perfect dinner party guests. Important postscript, I saved the rest of the crumbs and they are actually delicious. Small chance I am eating them with a spoon out of an empty Rao’s jar.
