the dinner party

what i have realized as i've gotten older is that i am, in fact, like my mother. every time she cooks for large groups of people (ie family), she spends almost the entire time in the kitchen. no level of exhortation gets her to stop jumping up every ten minutes to tend to whatever is cooking on the stove.

i am not quite the same, but when i surmise about why i like dinner parties as much as i do, certain similarities suddenly reveal themselves. i like dinner parties for two reasons: i like to feed people, and i like to mix my friends (to varying levels of success). but...i don't particularly like to join in the festivities myself, because the high point for me is really the cooking part. is that strange? perhaps. but no matter how well i plan, no matter how done i am with cooking when people arrive, i'm somewhat distracted at the end of the cooking, and all i really want to do is watch everyone else have fun. in fact, since i've already had my fun, i'd go as far to say that i'd cook for everyone and then go to sleep while they eat.

that said, last night i had some people over. i didn't set a menu until the day before: carrot-ginger soup, roast chicken and risotto with some sort of green veg (which turned out to be beet greens: "great alternative to spinach!"), and a pear-gingerbread trifle. as is wont to happen when i cook for large groups, the most important part is dessert, and everything else takes a backseat. the menu wasn't quite the most harmonious combination of flavors that i could have had, but given several factors: budget, how much i could carry back from star, how much i had left to give to the dinner mentally, which supermarkets i'd have to go to, etc. i worried a little that there were too many herbs and spices: ginger, then thyme (because a roast chicken should always be roasted with thyme), then ginger/cinnamon/star anise. kind of a lot, yeah? usually when i do a roast chicken, i overdo thyme because carrien and i love thyme - there's thyme in everything. but i attempted to show some restraint this time, so only the chicken (and the accompanying chicken gravy) had thyme in it. i think that given my weaknesses, i did rather admirably: the risotto was nice and simple, just rice, butter, onions, and stock.

now for some conclusions from the evening. the soup was a little chunkier than i would have liked, though i blendered it, so i should probably invest in a food mill (or rather, i should have just sieved the whole mixture). but the flavor was pretty good - it was very ginger-y because i probably threw in more than i was supposed to. the chicken was pretty good, though i'm still horrible at carving and i put a little too much paprika in the rub for the skin. gravy: check. i always forget how much spinach and beet greens shrink when cooked, so i think i should have probably gotten more, but oh well. for some reason the bit of cream i added didn't thicken quite right, so they were more liquidy than i like them. however, the risotto was really good - it was 1/3 wild rice mix, 2/3 arborio rice, which was quite a nice combination. the "really wild" (ie, with the skin on the outside of the rice grains) rice was a little crunchy still, which usually is a huge, looming, obvious sign of failure in terms of risotto, but which was fine by my book because it added a little texture. hard arborio rice in risotto: cardinal sin; hard wild rice: somewhat acceptable.

so let me talk a little bit about this dessert. i wasn't sure it was going to work: would the gingerbread overpower the pears? would the pastry cream set? would the pears actually taste pear-like (it's almost winter and pears are not a winter fruit by any means)? i made the pastry cream first: i tried the julia child recipe again because i wanted to see if i could get it to work again. the last time i made it, i didn't quite cook the flour long enough, and this time i made sure i did. where by "i made sure i did," i mean that i accidentally cooked if for long enough. i accidentally left the stove on low when i really meant to turn it off, though, so it thickened even a bit more than i wanted to, and became more like a cold pate a choux, rather than a thick-but-creamy pastry cream base. the trick with julia child's pastry cream is that you have to add things to it (beaten egg whites, whipped cream, you name it) in order to get it into a servable state. knowing this, i bought cream to whip. but man - folding that stuff into the pastry cream was a nightmare because i just didn't know if it was going to actually lighten up. luckily, four or five cups of whipped cream later, it did. so now we have an enormous amount of pastry cream. if it were summer i would just make copious numbers of fruit tarts (how can you resist anything that is essentially ripe berries resting on pillows of whipped cream?), but it's not and the fruit's not really worth having. so...if you have suggestions for what we should do with a large amount of pastry cream, i'm all ears.

back to the dessert....it turned out quite well! i am no good at estimating how much alcohol should go into these things, and given that the gingerbread was slightly denser than what i am used to using for trifle, i should have used a bit more alcohol (i used a half-rum, half-amaretto mixture). ah well. the unsurprising but surprising thing was that both trifle and risotto tasted better the next day as cold leftovers: it was unsurprising in that i like leftovers so i would automatically like them, however it was surprising in that both were an order of magnitude better the next day. i will say this: i love salt and pepper as seasonings, and i make sure i do it right every time (although since there is white pepper in our pepper mill right now, it's a bit harder to get the pepper correct).

in retrospect, i think that what i like even better than these informal dinner parties is cooking for two or three people who will come over and chat with me while i cook. they sit, occasionally do some small thing like chopping, but really they're just there to hang out with me while i make us food. besides, then you don't have the issue of only inviting some of your friends to the type of event where you would normally invite all of them if it were logistically and monetarily possible.