Seamless Entertaining

Jerry and I went to dinner at Mike and Agnes's house on Saturday night, so I could gather some food tips in my quest to Find New Things to Cook.  And I did, but not in the way I expected.   It was more like A New Way to Think about Food and Feeding People.

A friend once commented that you want to go to dinner at someone's house not for the food but to see their style. 

Mike and Agnes's style is seamless and down-to-earth.  Dining table set with Agnes's collection of Fiestaware and garden flowers; an array of pre-dinner munchies set out on a counter; a tomato salad composed on a platter; a peach pie at the ready.  Mike barbequed chicken, whacked it into easy-to-serve pieces after it was cooked, and we ate.  Wine in sensible juice glasses, none of that easy-to-topple stemware (the one in the photo was for pre-dinner prosecco).

And all of this followed by fresh peach pie.


Agnes, who's in my quilt group, had told me that Mike does most of the cooking (she does the baking), so I asked him about recipes.  He's an intuitive cook, a natural, and he knows ingredients and isn't afraid to experiment--but quantifying it?  Not really happening.

"We actually have a somewhat monotonous diet, e.g., Friday night almost always hamburgers, but really good ones," he wrote in an e-mail.  "We just buy a mess of stuff every Sat and then argue every night about how we're going to throw it together, but all fresh food."

Out of  the "mess of stuff,"  he concocts Macaroni and Cheese with three cheeses, ham, spinach, onions, cayenne,  and oregano, baked until extra crispy.  Also Paella, with arborio rice, chicken broth, and saffron, "everything else optional" (I questioned him about this, and he suggested sweet Italian sausage, boneless chicken thighs, green beans, prawns, scallops, and cod as possibilities). Pizza with Trader Joe's dough, "just roll out and add stuff."  He makes pesto in large batches and freezes it.  BBQ Chicken, quartered and marinated in lemon for an hour, sprinkled with salt and pepper, cooked over a hot fire, which is what we had for dinner.

Every Saturday morning the two of them do the week's shopping: Trader Joe's, a produce shop, and a place to buy meat/fish.   They both work full-time, and on on weekdays they decompress before they start cooking.  Which means they often don't eat until 9:30 or 10 pm.

"We've learned to go to bed on full stomachs," Agnes says.



Mike was surprised to hear we don't own a grill.   He recommends the small Weber grill, below,  for people who don't want an intimidating rig from Home Depot. Not as good as charcoal bbq-ing, he says, but pretty good. For us, it'd be fine.

Weber, "Gas Go-Anywhere" grill, which Mike and Agnes take camping; Agnes has actually baked bread in one of these.

God knows what people make of our entertaining style (a host who's off-the-dime on pouring wine and making drinks, a jumpy and forgetful hostess who probably ought to drink nothing in order to keep her frayed wits about her).  I can guarantee they'd see a contrast between our style and Mike and Agnes's.

  

I've been thinking about this. My parents fussed and put on a show when they had people to dinner.  I just fuss.  There's nothing relaxed about it, nor about my approach to cooking in general.  I don't experiment, and I don't have fun.  I certainly don't "throw it all together."  It's a chore.  And a super-serious one when it comes to feeding other people.

I don't know if  I'll ever be laissez-faire enough to inventory the fridge and type the ingredients into Google to see what to cook, which Mike says he's done.  But a take-away here--besides part of the peach pie; Jerry was over the moon--is that having fun with food conveys itself to guests and makes things more enjoyable.  A word I don't really like, but honest God, it applies here. A gift to yourself and to whoever crosses your doorstep.  What a concept.