Two Meals

A while back I wrote a rather impassioned blog about the state of American cooking culture, and about what we lose by discouraging our up-and coming adults from learning how to cook. I was on a roll about how many of my peers don't know how to cook, and maybe never will, and what we lose as a generation when we lose that ability to express ourselves socially through food.

What I didn't write about in that blog was all the people of my generation who do choose to cook. I was lucky enough to be a dinner guest several times over the past couple weeks, a novel idea for someone who is much more accustomed to being a host. These were two really different dinners; the first a beautiful, festive evening with interesting strangers and close friends alike. The second, a casual, one-on-one meal with one of my oldest friends. Both times I left full and happy, no question about that, but I also left with the comforting knowledge that maybe the art of cooking and creating social bonds through food isn't a dying art after all.

One:

Heading over to Tia's house with Masha and Mike, I have no idea what's cooking. It's Tia's birthday, and she's invited some friends over for dinner, and I don't know any of them except the two I've come with. I'm also not used to being a dinner guest. Dinner host, always, dinner guest, less so, and I've got a lot of restless host-y energy coursing through me right now. I've kind of got to force myself to relax. I've come with an open mind, a healthy appetite, and a bottle of wine. Masha opens the front door without knocking, and standing in the foyer I can smell food and heat wafting through the house from the kitchen, and hear running water and clanging pans in the next room.

In Tia's kitchen, I'm hit with that familiar happy feeling from when I was growing up. A large part of my love of the art of the dinner party comes straight from my childhood, when my parents would invite a handful of their friends over, mostly writers, or our well travelled and foul mouthed hippy-ish neighbors from down the block, and get cooking. The food would be well on it's way to completion by the time people started showing up, and my mother would answer the door with a glass of wine in her hand, ("Always have a glass of wine in your hand when you open the door," she told me when I started hosting my own parties, "if you're relaxed, your guests will be too.") and Tim, or Rigel, or Mike and Jen would start in on a glass of wine or a martini, and try the dip, leaning against the counter in our kitchen saying, "Anything I can do?"My parents were great at this, timing the food and the booze and the music, so that when their guests started showing up, there would be excitement and anticipation pouring out of the kitchen, but nobody would ever see them break a sweat. It was an art form, and Tia had nailed it.

"Anything I can do to help?" I asked. Tia had me set out some cheeses on a pretty little multi-tiered stand, (Brie and pepper-jack, and a completely addictive marinated mozzarella) and whip up some pretty, summer-y grapefruit and pomegranate cocktails. Tia busied herself with a mind-blowing spinach quiche with a homemade crust that totally re-defined for me what a quiche is supposed to taste like, a chunky salad with avocados and field greens, and a vat of fresh steamed mussels that smelled like the ocean and burst their shells wide open on the heat of the stove like little garlicky, beach-grown flowers. On Tia's porch, we sat in the dark surrounded by candles and fairy-lights and drank mussel broth straight from the bowl, and Masha told us all about how in Russia, you toast the host, and then each other, and when you're done, you take turns toasting every member of the hosts family, if only as as an excuse to continue drinking. That was all well and good, but as we opened another bottle of wine and Tia appeared from the kitchen with a fresh berry tart in her hands, we simply couldn't help but make yummy noises and raise our glasses to our host, over, and over, and over again.

Two:

"Can I do anything to help?" I ask.

"Absolutely not," John replies, "I'm making you dinner." Truthfully I'm just as happy for it, because I've just come off my second day at my new job, and I'm exhausted. Normally John and I share cooking responsibilities on our semi-regular dinner nights, but tonight John has taken the reigns, and I'm inclined to let him. Apparently reading my mind, John has contrived the most comforting of comfort food dinners, meat loaf and mashed potatoes with corn on the cob. I haven't had meat loaf in probably 15 years, but somehow tonight seems the perfect evening for it. It's a hot and sticky night, probably too hot to be running the oven, but it doesn't matter. Meatloaf is exactly the thing.

We spend so much more time talking than cooking, it's almost comical. "I really am going to start making dinner, I swear!" he assures me, but I'm not worried. John tells me about the girl he was seeing until very recently, and about why it didn't work out. I tell him about my work frustrations, and about the rough week I've just come off of and how I've been feeling just a little bit fragile. About an hour in, John starts the meatloaf, and pours in so much BBQ sauce that we both have questions about how the meatloaf is going to set up, but decide, the hell with it and toss it in the oven. The sauce, it is worth noting, is from the legendary Dinosaur BBQ, the best Barbecue joint in the town we both grew up in, and that gets us started on our hometown, our families, his sister who is getting married, my sister who is just starting out on her acting career, our friends from high school who we don't see anymore, all of it.

Our concerns about the meatloaf were unfounded. It is perfectly moist and surprisingly spicy, and full of Dinosaur BBQ magic. I've got work in the morning, but we're still talking and listening to music, and then it turns out that John has the ingredients for root-beer floats, a sign if I've ever heard one that the evening is not over. (Especially when said floats are fortified with rum, a choice I strongly endorse.) We watch videos online and eat huge chunks of Italian bread with way too much butter and get a little bit drunk. There is nothing formal about this dinner, but then, there doesn't need to be. We've known each other since I had braces and he had frosted blonde tips, and a polite, formal dinner would just feel silly. Instead we eat amazing meatloaf made with hometown barbecue sauce, drink grown-up versions of a classic childhood dessert, and insist that we are going to get together again sooner rather than later, to do it all again. Perhaps next time I'll even help cook.