To get you excited for the mashed potato recipe tomorrow….ok actually just because it’s hilarious and I adore Martha Stewart and her serene awkwardness….here is Snoop Dogg’s visit to Martha in which he educated her about speaking and his posse (starts around the 45sec mark), while Martha taught him to peel potatoes and exposed a lewd liquor bottle. Thanks to Kim for sending it to me!
It’s been so busy here with the launch of this site that I’ve hardly even thought about Thanksgiving – the biggest national dinner party day of the year! My day of worship at the table of the dinner party gods! An entire government-approved holiday just to have a dinner party! Inexcusable, really.
But this year is a little different, which is why I haven’t been thinking much about my Thanksgiving menu or decor. My grandpa is fairly ill with cancer and, since he’s the best grandpa a girl ever had, I’m going out to Denver to visit with him over the holiday. A bunch of other family members are coming too, so we’ll do something Thanksgiving-related, but we aren’t sure yet how up to eating or anything celebratory Gramps will be. My idea is to do a “Thanksgiving Leftovers” Thanksgiving: skip the big dinner itself and go straight to the turkey/mashed potato/cranberry sauce/gravy/stuffing sandwiches! Come on, you have to admit that’s everyone’s favorite part anyway. We can all sit around and eat whatever we want, and I think Gramps will be more comfortable eating casually than at a big formal dinner.
Since we’re all getting in late Wednesday night and there won’t be much time for cooking, we’ll probably just pickup ready-made fixings at Whole Foods and jazz them up a little. Tomorrow I will post a fantastic mashed potato dish that I will make if I have time on Thursday morning. This year, though, it’s not about the food at all. It’s about just being there together; which, after all, is the real aim of Thanksgiving.
I promise lots of decor and menu ideas next year.
It was gorgeous and a wonderful evening. Alexis was down from Connecticut for the day and stopped by to stay hi while I was stringing the flowers for the ceiling. Of course I invited her to stay for dinner, and she was such a wonderful addition to our party – and got to hear lots of stories about Fairfield (where we all grew up) that either scared or intrigued her! Ha!
It’s an artistic group, so it was really fun to create a colorful table with bouquets of color pencils over brown craft paper that begged to be drawn on. I used it as the easiest place cards ever – just wrote everyone’s names above their plates.
The flowers were simple, but added a punch of color. I bought four bunches of carnations in yellow and three shades of pink, and kept each color in its own vase rather than mixing them. It made the flowers look cohesive and at the same time, with the colored pencils, made the table as a whole very colorful.
I then strung blossoms on three long strands of thread and hung them from the ceiling for something more festive and with a little bit of South Asian flair.
We made gorgeous doodles.
And the food…Anna brought her gorgeous macaroons made with organic sweetened condensed milk, but I was so consumed with eating them that I completely forgot to take a photograph. Just imagine perfectly browned, chewy golden macaroons, and you’ll have a good sense of how lovely they were. Please continue for the post-mortem on my dishes.
Timing a dinner party is one of the most important skills a host can have, and is also one of the most difficult. Cooking always takes longer than you think it will, talking with your guests is fun and takes you away from what you should be doing in the kitchen, and once you get behind it’s very hard to catch up. I’m certainly not always on time, but I try my best to ensure we eat when I said we would. I don’t like going to someone’s house for dinner, expecting to eat fairly close to the time I arrive, and having to wait…and wait…and wait. I’ve definitely done that to guests, but I really hate doing it. To avoid that fate, I will literally print this out for myself and post it on my kitchen corkboard so I know exactly what I need to be doing when. Without it, I always forget something vital that had to be done at a certain time so everything else could be finished at a certain time….I’m terribly forgetful and have to constantly refer to my timeline to be on time!
I’ll write something longer on how to time your parties, but as an example for now I’m just going to lay out my plan for my upcoming dinner party on Saturday, which starts at 7pm. Unfortunately, the last minute nature of the pasta dish means I won’t get to hang out in the living room much with my guests, but no worries – the kitchen will just become part of the party, and our cocktail hour won’t be a full hour anyway. We’ll just get started with dinner as quickly as possible!
Friday:
Saturday:
We all have our giant bottle of Maker’s Mark in the liquor cabinet (or is it just me?!) and maybe one nicer bottle for special occasions or for the visiting bourbon aficionado. So new ideas of bourbons to choose are always lovely. The Atlantic reviewed smaller bourbon labels last week. After describing bourbon distilleries as either foxes, who know many things, or hedgehogs, who know one big thing, Clay Risen noted that some foxes produce smaller labels that may be hard to find but can be worth the hunt.
Remember when I decided I needed to try gluten-free pasta to see if I could substitute it in for my tagliatelle with gorgonzola? I ran down to the store the other day for the ingredients to make classic mac and cheese with rice pasta, and couldn’t find rice pasta. However, they did have quinoa pasta and corn pasta, so I chose the corn because it came in classic elbow macaroni and cooked it up. It tastes good! Honestly, I couldn’t even tell the difference. Plus, according to the wise comments, rice pasta falls apart anyway – so I will take that to mean my choice of corn pasta was a genius move on my part and even if the store had had rice pasta, I undoubtedly would still have chosen the corn because I just know things like that….yeah….
So this is excellent, and will let me go with my original menu idea of soup followed by pasta and simple veggies, and maybe a nice brown bread for the gluten eaters. One of my guests offered to bring macaroons for dessert, which are obviously gluten-free and sound soooo good! I’ll just save the balsamic truffles for another time; it’s always kind of a nice feeling to know you’ve got a dessert in your back pocket that will go with almost any meal and no one has seen it before. We’ll start with a nice simple zucchini and goat cheese appetizer, which I can not only make the day before, but will be extra vegetables (always good!) and a little protein in the cheese.
As for libations, a non-drinking friend is bringing something tasty and non-alcoholic. For the drinkers, I think the wine will have to marry well with the gorgonzola but otherwise could probably be whatever you like. I’ll probably just ask at the wine shop what they would recommend, as I’m no wine expert. I even went to a lovely wine tasting the other night that was meant to be focused on how to order wine from a mysterious wine list – we all know how foreign those look, right?! This was information I needed! – and I kid you not, the advice they gave over and over was “Ask the sommelier.” So basically there is no way to figure it out yourself. Oh well, I still had a great time at the tasting and got to see friends from college, so it was overall a win.
Making herb butter is such an easy way to make a big impact. Guests tend to be really impressed that you took the extra time to actually “make butter” – even though it takes five minutes, tops – and it can really jazz up a plain piece of bread that would have otherwise not added much to your menu as a whole.
Herb Butter
If you’re a salted butter kind of person, either use salted butter or add your own salt. A dash of kosher salt in herb butter would throw in a nice flavor, especially mixed with a more subtle herb like basil.
Using a fork, mix the softened butter and herbs together until blended evenly. Place in a mold or pretty dish, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until set.
If you forgot to put out the butter for softening (as I usually do), you can microwave it on low power to soften it up. Do this veeerry carefully, though, because it will melt faster than you think. In my microwave, I put it in for 10 seconds on 50% power. However, every microwave is different, so err on the side of caution in yours.
