it's all about the table

do you ever find that when you're having a dinner party, and you're finally sitting down to eat, you...don't actually feel like eating? it's one part adrenaline from getting everything done, and one part nervousness about people liking what you've made - especially when you're cooking for people you haven't ever cooked for. it's not like cooking for friends back home, where you've already been tried and vetted. granted, i don't think anyone's going to be judgmental about just a dinner party, but when i do give one, there is always that competitive spirit that aims to impress, vying with the more social desire to feed people.

i think i've mentioned this before, but really, the best part of the dinner party for me is the cooking part; of course, when you cook something, somebody needs to eat it, so naturally it makes sense to invite some people over. and the social phenomenon of a dinner party really appeals to me: a group of people gathered around a table, talking and idling the evening away. take note of the table: it actually makes a huge difference, having now entertained for four years without one. it really surprises me just how much having the table matters - just having this physical thing that everybody is sitting around, and that you can rest your elbows on.

back to the matter at hand: a recap of last night's dinner. i know you're all waiting with bated breath. i was going to be cooking for more people than usual - typically i cook for four to six, on a given weekday in cambridge, but it was going to be a party of ten. i wanted to improve on the previous dinner party with respect to logistics, where it wouldn't be late and where i could set everything up ahead of time. i thought that dessert (vanilla panna cotta) slowed me down last time, and i also didn't give it enough time to set. i had been wanting to make a cheesecake for a few weeks - i just bought a good set of stainless steel springforms from sur la table, for cheap - so there's dessert. i also didn't want to make as many separate things as i did last time - salad, meat dish, veg side - but i did want to maintain the robustness of having lots of vegetables, since it's summer (aka produce season) and i do believe in both butter and vegetables. so, in the interest of time, space, and economy, i decided to make a big all-inclusive pasta with some sort of veg side/salad.

i don't know why this is, but i always seem to be better at making desserts, even though i spend more time thinking about the dinner part. cooking (as opposed to baking) is the more essential skill, because you've got to eat dinner, but you don't have to eat dessert; because cooking is the survival skill, i've tried to cultivate it. perhaps it's just the logistics of cooking for more people than i'm used to - apparently i can really only do 4-6 people or 25 people, well - but i think that in both dinner parties, dinner has been a bit of a letdown, but dessert has always been good. last night, for the salad, i did a green bean salad - i had been thinking green beans, and was sold when the green beans at whole foods looked uncommonly good. they were really green, a little waxy in sheen, crisp, and just very attractive. the salad is a cherrypicked combination of two different salads i've made before (for those who know them, the wheatberry salad and the dilled warm green bean salad). so: green beans, smoked mozzarella, tomatoes, oranges and their zest, and a little bit of balsamic vinaigrette which i couldn't get to emulsify correctly (oops). i was going to add some cilantro too, but i thought there was enough in the salad already, so there you go.

for the record, i've been superbusy this week - longish hours at the office followed by 6-7 hours for my other job - so i didn't even decide on what to make until friday night. i was a little worried about making enough food for ten people, so i thought a pasta with meat and veg in it would be doable. specifically: sweet italian pork sausage, a little bit of bacon, onions, garlic, thyme, and peas. verdict: so-so. the stuff:pasta ratio was a little too low for my liking, and i think one more veg would have been good - mushrooms, or maybe sundried tomatoes to add a bit of acidity. oh, i also added a couple pinches of the smoked salt (smoked alderwood salt from whole foods, from the bulk foods aisle), and i thought it was pretty good. i think it would be better in stews, or long braises, but it went with the bacon pretty well - it would be out of place in a vegetarian dish. i also think that the sizes of things were a little off - the sausage was a little too big (i took the casings off and tore the sausages into bits before browning them), and i thought the pasta was as well, so it was a bit hard to get a bite with everything in it. if i did this again, i would probably use a different pasta - maybe an orecchiette or acini de pepe, or at least pipette - i used chocciole or something like that, from whole foods, because they didn't have pipette (a barilla brand pasta shape that i really like - it's a little smaller than the chocciole).

i also thought that the pasta lacked something saucy to bind it all together. i had originally been thinking that i'd make a pesto to fulfill that purpose, but then i remembered that i have neither blender nor food processor in this apartment, so that was out of the question. i briefly considered buying premade pesto, but i wasn't really ever serious about that. i was hoping that the surfeit of onions and combined, concentrated meat juices would be enough to sauce the pasta, in combination with parmesan cheese, but it just wasn't quite there. i also considered tomatoes, because the pasta is essentially an all'amatriciana with a couple of extras tacked on, but tomatoes are super-expensive these days, and i didn't want to use canned. in retrospect, a pesto would have been perfect - a little bit of vegetal freshness to contrast the meat flavors - and i should have at least gone with some tomatoes. consider this my mea culpa.

i thought dessert was pretty good, though - i ended up making a gingered plum compote to go with the cheesecake, for a few reasons: (1), for color; (2), to bump up the net volume of a serving of dessert because there would be so many people; and (3) because fruit is always good with cheesecake. i realized far too late (ie, now) that this is the second time that i've made something with yogurt and forgotten to tell c, who is allergic to yogurt (oh, crap) and i'm hoping that he's not really sick today. perhaps the bacteria cultures in yogurt die when they're cooked? i sure hope so, although i'm not sure that that's the case at all. well, anyway, the fact that i had to use anna's lemon things (not the ginger-flavored thins that i generally use) did not detract from the cheesecake, although i do think that ginger flavored thins are a little better. the plums - which i typically make for plum shortcake - were pretty good. i grated the ginger this time, which eliminated the problem of the gross texture combination of sauteed plum and minced ginger. we also had some farmer's market ufo/donut peaches that y+g brought, which were really good - peaches are one of those things i would actually buy at a farmer's market, because you know they haven't been artificially treated with ethylene to make sure they ripen at the end of their thousands-of-miles-long journey to your supermarket.

despite the hiccups and poor choices, i thought that dinner went well - i'm slowly getting the hang of dinner parties at a table, for more than four (and, budgeting for this many people). oh, and iced tea, take 2 went well - i used the harney + sons peach iced tea, slightly sweetened. i might go buy some more before the summer is over - that's how much i like this tea. anyway, this dinner had the right amount of things - everything fit well on the table, including a couple of ramekins with lemon slices in them - yes, i did buy meyer lemons at whole foods just because they were beautiful. plus, you don't find them all that often on this coast, although they're common in california. they were this gorgeous, brilliant egg-yolk-y yellow. one of the things that i do miss about cambridge, though, is that it's so much easier to have spontaneous dinner party (these tend to be more dinner, less party) in cambridge because i can just send out an email in the afternoon and stop by the supermarket on the walk home. there's no having to contend with completely variegated schedules because almost everyone i know is in school; no having to spend an hour and half going to the grocery store; no having to wait for people to travel from more than 20 minutes away. if i'm wandering around the city, i don't mind when it takes forever to get anywhere or do anything, but if i've planned something, the time that it takes to do anything in this city really get to me.

notes
in the boston globe's (not that great) interview with tim cushman, the chef/owner of o ya, he reports that the restaurant is booked solid for 1 1/2 months. right now i'm feeling pretty good about having made a reservation the day the review came out. when i made i wondered if i was being silly, but now i'm glad i didn't have to have dinner surrounded by obnoxious yuppie foodies. p.s. i am completely aware that most people would consider me to be a yuppie foodie. and to those people: i defy you! i'm not a foodie; i just happen to like food. and food science.

also, about the chocolate bundt cake - looked fabulous, tasted not bad. i really should have bought toothpicks to test the cake, which i thought was slightly overdone. whoops. these are the problems attendant to using a 10-cup bundt pan instead of of a 12-cup bundt pan. so the cake really needed an extra day for its flavor to develop, because i thought the brown sugar was a little too prominent over the chocolate, but it was pretty good anyway. a chocolate glaze - i'd been thinking of making one, but judged it to be too easy to mess up the glaze when transporting the cake - would probably have been a welcome addition. i made one last summer when i made this cake for my office then.

i stopped by whole foods in union square with my mother on saturday; they don't sell cocoa nibs, but they do sell bittersweet callebaut chocolate. it mystifies me why they don't sell the bittersweet at whole foods tribeca. and i've really soured on new york grocery stores in general, given this whole cocoa nib fiasco. granted, they're somewhat hard to find in cambridge too - i walked all the way to christina's once, only to find that they were out, and the next time they had them, they didn't have the same ones - but you're supposed to be able to find anything in new york city, right? i would have liked to have done a taste test between the cocoa nibs i have - locally processed tazo brand nibs, organically grown in the dominican republic - with another type of cocoa nibs. i really liked the ones that i got at christina's before the tazo ones - they were smaller and have a purer chocolate smell. perhaps one of these days i'll happen upon them, and let me tell you, those will be happy days.