How to Host a Dinner Party (9 page)

Recipes are guidelines, not the word of God. We are free to reinterpret them. A red onion is a suitable substitute for a shallot, but not a good substitute for lobster. Spinach is a fine replacement for escarole. But it’s difficult to make those choices without a comfortable understanding of food.

STRESS BRAISING

So many of us bake to relax, but what do we do with all the cookies and cupcakes? When we fill our spare moments with baking, it becomes counterproductive to the time we spend at the gym. Bringing sweets to the office makes us popular. But at some point we are fattening people up and then we have to listen to our co-workers babble on about their failed diets. The other problem with stress baking is that it doesn’t freeze well.

Consider stress braising. When I’m upset, I don’t want to eat or write or be around people, but I don’t mind cooking. Braising, as we’ve established, is a method best done in advance and it stores well in the freezer.

The next time you’re frustrated with your idiot children, thoughtless boss, or boorish neighbour, and you’re thinking of whipping up something with butter, flour, and eggs, head to the butcher shop. Pick up some pork belly, lamb shoulder, or beef cheeks. Throw them in a pot with onions, celery, and carrots, cover with water or wine, chuck it in the oven and get back to your life. The actual labour is so minimal. I don’t know about you, but I like shopping. Heading into the market to pick up one or two items is quality time alone.

When you pull a quivering mound of meat from its braising bath, slice off a little taste with a butter knife, sprinkle some salt, and let the fat melt on your tongue, you’ll be astonished at how little effort it was. Cooled and wrapped, these pucks of meat will stack up in your freezer. Removing them will feel like paying for a vacation with money that you’ve responsibly saved.

The problem with braising is that no one wants to make preparations for tomorrow. Few people take the advice to braise today to eat tomorrow. They just hear the cooking time of four to six hours, then try to cut that short at the last minute. They end up popping a leg of lamb in the oven without enough time before dinner, braising it for three and a half hours, and then wonder why it’s not tender enough.

I get it. We’re all busy just trying to put food on the table today. Hosting a dinner party means devoting our spare time to make a special evening. If it were easy and effortless, it would be called watching TV.

The people at your local supermarket should be able to advise you in this area. No, they shouldn’t be expected to carry every cultivar of mango. But if they don’t know that button, crimini, and portobello mushrooms are all the same mushroom at different stages of growth, they are poorly trained or lousy employees. If they can’t tell you which apples are sweet and which are tart, stop shopping there.

And always ask merchants about carrying new products. Multiple requests will result in them making additions to their inventories.

THE PREP

 
 Last minute is the worst minute. Anything you can do in advance, do it. Thirty minutes before your guests arrive, you should be sitting, relaxing with a drink (see Chapter Four). Don’t answer the door by saying, “Oh, no, I was hoping you’d be late because I’m not ready.”

Before you begin to prep, clear your workspace as much as possible. Too often our workspace in our homes is defined as that one square foot of surface that is clean, the accidental eye in the hurricane of junk. To work efficiently, this area must be free of not just newspapers, schoolbooks, DVD covers, and vintage Spider-Man roller skates, but jars of fancy salt, rarely used kitchen appliances, nearly consumed wine bottles, bags of rice, clementines, or whatever other items you may have on your kitchen counter. These things should be on shelves. The workspace is for working.

Wear an apron, preferably one that covers your upper body. Or better yet, wear B-list clothes to cook in, as you would for painting. I find that wearing a cooking outfit helps differentiate the time spent prepping. It marks a clear division between this type of work and being presentable for company, not that anyone needs to dress up for company. (But you know you can’t be sweaty, right?)

Place a wet cloth under your cutting board to keep it from slipping. Wash your board and knife after each task to prevent cross-contamination and flavours from transferring to each other. No one wants a guest to ask how you got the peaches to taste like onions.

Gem paks (aka deli cups or jam paks) are those universal-sized (8 oz./250 mL, 16 oz./500 mL, 32 oz./1 L) clear plastic containers that restaurants use to store their prep. You get them from supermarkets and delis when you buy stuff like cream cheese or capers, or you can buy them at a restaurant supply store, where they’ll be inexpensive, or online where they are widely available in bulk. They will save you so much space and aggravation. Using masking tape and marker, label every container with the date.

Most of us have a cupboard filled with a collection of mismatched Tupperware: round, square, tall, short; the oblong one for asparagus; the thimble-sized one we use for a teaspoon of leftover sauce we want to put in the back of the fridge and forget forever; the one with the red, oily stain that we use only when all the other containers are in use; the one without a lid; the one with the cartoon duck that we like to use for our lunches and we get mad if someone else uses it to entomb a baked half-potato.

TEN TIPS

Now that you’re ready to cook, here are ten tips that will improve your game.

1. READ RECIPES THOROUGHLY BEFORE COOKING.
You don’t have to memorize them, but if you know them well enough that you could tell a friend, it’ll save you time when cooking. It’s maddening to keep running back to the book while you’ve got something on the stove.

2. WHETHER THIS IS ADVANCE PREP OR DAY-OF PREP, GO THROUGH YOUR LIST AND ORGANIZE IT BY CHRONOLOGY.
Let’s say your list says: cook barley, cook kidney beans, portion tuna, chop cilantro and basil, juice lemons, chop onions and garlic, roast beets and peel. Some of this stuff takes a long time. Some of it is quick. Some of it can sit for a long while once prepared, and some of it needs to be as fresh as possible. Because the beets, beans, and barley will need to cook for at least a half, hour, deal with them first. This is even more important if you’re boiling a number of items, as we are here. Most of us have only one large pot, which is all the more reason to get the process started as early as possible.

3. LEARN TO COOK DRIED BEANS.
Beans are delicious, good for you, and so cheap they’re practically free. Soak them overnight. Boil them at a low simmer.

4. WHEN GRAINS, BEANS, POTATOES, OR ANY BOILED ITEM IS COOKED, STRAIN AND COOL IT THE RIGHT WAY BY SPREADING IT OUT ON A FLAT SHEET.
And don’t refrigerate until cool. Hot things poured into a bowl continue to cook. Hot things placed into the fridge steam the foods around them.

5. BE EASY ON YOUR HERBS.
Cilantro is hearty as hell. Whack it up at 9 a.m. and it’ll be just as vibrantly green at dinnertime. But basil will take any excuse to bruise and wilt. If you have a super-sharp knife and a soft touch, you can finely slice it earlier and cover it with a damp cloth; otherwise, save this one for the last minute. Mint, parsley, and dill are durable as well. Rosemary browns. It’s usually cooked, but if you’re garnishing with it, chop at the last minute if you want it to remain green. Same with tarragon, which darkens, rather than browns. Oregano leaves are small and should only be separated, not chopped.

6. CITRUS JUICES TASTE THEIR BEST WHEN THEY ARE FRESHLY SQUEEZED.
If you’re making ceviche, squeeze that lime straight onto the fish.

7. DON’T OVERCROWD YOUR PAN.
The concept of overcrowding the table translates to cooking as well. If the recipe says to brown meat in batches, it means that the surface area of metal must be on a high heat to achieve the proper colour and flavour. That browning is called a Maillard reaction. Put too much in the pan at once and the temperature drops. The meat turns grey instead of brown.

8. DON’T FUSS.
Once at work I was tossing something in a pan because I’d just learned to confidently flip and I wanted to show off. My chef reminded me that every time I shake or move the pan, I’m taking it off the heat. Keep your pan on the heat. Move it only when you have to. And in the name of Zeus, leave a searing piece of meat alone. If you’ve placed a piece of animal flesh in a hot pan with some fat, it will stick to the surface. When seared, it will release. Bother it before that, and the flesh will tear.

9. THINK TWICE ABOUT SLICING A ROAST AT THE TABLE.
The juices will run everywhere and of course you never know if it’s cooked the way you want until it’s been sliced into. When a roast is done, bring it to the table so everyone can see. It needs to rest before being carved. When it’s ready, you’ll find it easier to bring it back to the kitchen, slice it up, and assemble on the platter.

10. TASTE EVERYTHING, AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY.
Short of raw chicken, you should poke your finger and dig a spoon into everything as you go. Unless you have the sixth or seventh senses of telepathy or precognition, use the five senses you have. When you taste a sauce or salad as each ingredient is added, you will know when and where you went right or wrong.

What’s great about deli cups is that they’re uniform in shape, cheap, and disposable. Once we convert to these for storage, we don’t have to play fridge Jenga, trying to stack our Dirty Dozen ragtag group of misfit plastic containers so that there is room for a six-pack of beer. Because they are all the same and can be bought for about twenty-five cents apiece, we don’t mind giving them away with leftovers.

In my home they’re on my shelf, storing dry ingredients (cumin, guajillo chili, black pepper, pumpkin seeds, raisins). They’re in my fridge, storing leftovers (salsa, guacamole), with strips of masking tape that clearly label or date duck fat, pickled onions, or canned chipotles (you were
not
going to throw the tin in the fridge with cling wrap over the top). My freezer is stacked top to bottom with them, making it easy to shift things around when I need a serving of parsnip purée or mole, chicken stock or tomato sauce.