Throwing a dinner party

I will absolutely sing to you
if you come to dinner.

I love having dinner parties.  I love hosting, making food for loved ones, having pseudo-structured-but-basically-hang-out-time, and inviting people I care about into my home. 

My favorite dinner party, which I have been doing for years and years now, is Passover.  I didn’t grow up with Passover, but when my dad married my step-mom, we started doing it.  It is now my favorite holiday.  There’s a big yummy dinner, there are songs and games, it’s interactive, god tells you to get drunk, and the basis of the holiday is the fight for freedom and against injustice.  It is everything I want in a holiday. 

I am step-Jewish, so it’s a little fast and loose at my house in terms of what we eat and when we actually have the Seder.  The hagguddah itself is basically a mix of things I found in other ones that I liked—I mean it’s mostly all there but if you’re super into the rules of it, this is not the Passover for you.  Also, and I don’t know if you knew this Reader, but I’m a pretty casual person.  That doesn’t mean it’s not a fancy dinner with tablecloths and flowers and all that, but the things I care about in these situations, by other people’s standards, may seem not to have the most rhyme or reason.

For example:

I know I am supposed to be the host but this is turning into a fully interactive experience with all guests being called on to support the whole.  See, I have a lot of trouble not inviting everyone to Passover.  I mean, surely there’s room, we’ll work it out, it’s fine.  I start with the assumption that 

How many people can fit in la guagua?  At least one more!
This is also true of my living room.

everyone is going to cancel anyway, and then sometimes (this time) they don’t, or do but then un-cancel, or unexpectedly have guests in town and can they come too?, and now I am having a BYO dishes and forks party.  There is a serious potential space issue happening in my house this weekend. 

  “Andy” can’t be here because he has a conference, and this is very sad but also then he doesn’t have to hyperventilate when I put all the living room furniture in the dining room and every table in the house plus 2 or 3 folding tables that friends are bringing (BYO-table and chairs too…) in the living room because it’s the only space large enough that we can all sit in.  So our fancy dinner party is going to be in the living room on folding chairs, patio furniture, and card tables…but we will totally have tablecloths. 

Homegrown carrot pictured here,
with Monster for scale.

I have these visions of crafting food out of base ingredients—like you can just make sour cream and that goes in kugel and how cool is that!   Why use the bullion cube when you can make homemade chicken stock for matzo ball soup? I grew carrots and spring onions in the garden; I am focusing on recipes that use the same.  

But also boxed wine.  I mean, lots of people are coming and you’re all supposed to have 4 glasses each, and lord knows we’re going to blow right by that little divine recommendation.  TJ’s makes a perfectly acceptable wine.  In a box.  That I will be serving.  Next to my home-grown hand crafted side dishes, served with mismatched spoons on mismatched plates but we will have fresh flowers on those tables that I made my guests bring!

Pick your battles is I guess what I am saying (loudly, and often, directly to my guests, who have so far chosen “the battle over not bringing five soup bowls is not worth the battle over suggesting paper plates,” which I have an almost pathological aversion to because: this is supposed to be a fancy dinner).

Additionally, because I make bad choices, I want to make a brisket.  Not the regular traditional Jewish brisket, which is probably traditional because once everyone sits down to seder, there’s like an hour and a half of Passover stuff before you actually eat.  So food that can be in the oven until you get to it is really ideal for this holiday.  

But I don't wanna.  I want to make a bbq smoked brisket.  People who know how to smoke things, especially a brisket, insert your sardonic laughter here.  I *don’t* know how to smoke things.  

Ima do it, though.

We have a grill, a simple dinky little not-proving-anyone’s-suburban-manhood grill, and rumor has it that can be used.  By “rumor” I mean “the internet”, which has informed me that smoking a brisket is some next level ish, a right of passage for any real man, will make common mortals into wizards and sages, and so on and so on.  So…yeah, def try that for the first time before 20 people come to your house and you’re hosting a massive, interactive event.  Perfect!

I'm the one at the top.  Obviously.                                                

At the end of the day, with the mismatched tables, tablecloths, plates, wine glasses (BYO that too), flowers stolen from the abandoned area next to the Dollar Tree or plucked out of the front yard to spruce up the place, and ample boxed wine, I get to do my favorite holiday event with a lot of wonderful people.  It’ll all be fine.  If we end up ordering pizza it’ll just be all the more memorable.  

Happy Spring everyone!!