Monday 18 February 2013

Family Dinner

I didn't miss it! Promise...it's late, but it's here! And it's still Monday, so it still counts!

I am sorry this is so late, but today I was in a drug-induced sleep most of the day. Yesterday evening, I realized that I am coming down with yet another cold, and promptly got into a Ginger-Infused-Sweat-Bath (yes they are as gross as they seem), and drown myself in Nyquil for the last 27 hours.

Sweating and sleeping. As much as possible. That's my cold remedy. 

It's disgusting, and it's success rate depends on how early into your symptoms you start it. 

But ok...not the point. And also gross. Moving on. 

Today, when I woke up from my 27-hour-drug-induced-sweat-sleep, I found this lovely article on my Facebook wall: 

A Professional Cook Puts Restaurants on the Back Burner


If you're not going to read the whole article, let me give you the Cliff's Notes:

  • It's written by Samin Nosrat, who is kinda a big deal. She was trained at Chez Panise, and later moved to Italy where she worked with butcher Dario Checchini and chef Bendetta Vitali. She then spent five years as a sous chef at Eccolo. She's young and vibrant, and loves to teach cooking classes and write. Basically she's everything that's right with San Francisco's food scene.

  • Her main point of her article is that it is important to eat together. It is so much less about the marrow stuffed squid, or the truffel dosa, and more about that amazing thing that happens when friends begin walking through the front door, wine in hand and the smell of onions and garlic in the air:


I’ve found that when people sit down for dinner together at home, a certain kind of unrehearsed magic happens. Unlike in restaurants, not everything needs to be perfect. Most of us rarely have the right number of chairs or knives or wine glasses. Some of my most memorable meals were cooked and shared in less than ideal circumstances—from a regal fish stew cooked over a makeshift grill on a hilltop in Piedmont, Italy, to a humble bowl of angel hair pasta with aging garlic and a handful of wilting spinach foraged from the back of the crisper drawer at a friend’s Brooklyn apartment. What remains with me after all these years isn’t whether we were able to find Dijon mustard for that vinaigrette or whether the onions were diced just so, but rather the way the autumn light on that hillside changed as the sun went down, the aroma that filled the kitchen as we browned those imperfectly cut onions, and the raunchy jokes my friends told that still make me blush.

OK, so this paragraph, RIGHT THERE, makes me scream at my computer screen "I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND SO SO BAD!!!!"

I love her. She nailed it. 

Around here we have "Family Dinner" once a month or so (depending on the time of the year, and the schedules).  But in reading her article, I realize that I have been having some rendition of family dinner ever since I first moved out of my parents house, and has been something that I have carried with me wherever I have lived. 

It might have been me being Mexican, and not knowing that cooking for 1 - 2 people is possible, and instead I cooked for 47 and then made all of my roommates come and sit at the table with me, and share a bottle of wine. Or it might just be that I love the feeling of people being together, and will do anything to get roommates, boyfriends, or best friends, to show up at my house and let me cook for them.  It's something in my blood, or simply in my genetic programming. 


Now, being married is the best possible thing ever. Of course, because my husband is weird  and sweet and a genius who has no problem being married to a crazy person. But also because I am the woman of my own household. I have my own kitchen. There is not sharing pots and pans with roommates, or letting everyone know 24 hours in advance that I plan on having guests over. There is no "keeping it down" because a roommate has an early work meeting the next day, and we're laughing too loud.

As I've mentioned before, we're redecorating our living room, and one of the first things that we invested in was a proper 8 person dinning room table. And even this moment, it is sitting actually in the living room  with a secondary table attached to it - a "frankenstein-table" of sorts. It's ugly, but it allows us to get 15 - 18 people in one place for dinner. Which some how, no matter how small we try to keep family dinner, it always ends up with someone sitting on bar stool, hunched over our coffee table because its the only seat left in the house. 

So Samin, I love you. You get me. You get why we cringe when we get dinner reservations from friends to restaurants that are 4-dollar signs. You get why I'd so much rather cram everyone around a mismatched table and let everyone sip their wine until it's way too late. 

You get why these things are important. 

Things like  how some meatloaf muffins can make a new temporary roommate feel right at home. 





Or how some times champagne and a Bellini Cocktail cakes can be the perfect way to finish an evening. 



Or how sometimes the best way to taste a vintage limited edition beer, is to split it in shot glasses and taste among friends. 


Or that every family dinner needs a little debauchery.

 And chocolate mustaches are always a good idea.


When in doubt, yes, add booze and light it on fire.
 That homemade ice cream sandwiches and bubbly are the perfect way to spend a sunny afternoon on the deck.

 And that your kitchen can never be happier than when it's filled with your loves, in adorable aprons.

That when it doubt, triple the recipe.


That adding new babies to the mix changes everything, in the best of ways.



And that moments like these never happen in a restaurant.




So if any of you happen to know Samin, let her know that her future BFF is lookin' for her. And there's a dinner invite with her name on it.

Hearts,

jenni

1 comment:

  1. Love this post. Love you, too! Thanks for the kind words, Jenni!

    ReplyDelete

Got some comments? Right this way...