How to Host a Dinner Party (19 page)

Preheat the oven to 250°F (120°C). Place the tortillas in an ovenproof pan. Cover with a damp towel. Keep in the oven until needed.

In a pan on high heat, toast the cumin and coriander seeds until smoking, about two minutes. Cool, then grind in a spice grinder with the black pepper.

In a large pan, sauté the onion in the olive oil or pork fat on medium heat until soft, about five minutes. Add the spices. Continue cooking for a minute, then fold in the shredded pork shoulder. Stir until warm.

To assemble:
I like to put tacos together — pork, sour cream, pickled onion, cilantro, salsa — for guests because I find that if tacos are served family style, guests tend to overload each tortilla. If you want guests to help themselves, put everything in bowls and leave the tortillas in the pan, covered, so they’ll retain some heat while on the table.

Serves four.

Rice Bowl

I like to eat anything on top of a bowl of rice (basmati is good, but I prefer the sticky Japanese rice), with pickled vegetables. Here are the basics.

For the rice

Rinse the rice twice. Cover with water. Add the salt, sugar, and rice vinegar. Cook on low until firm but sticky, about fifteen minutes.

For the pickles

Peel and julienne the carrot and daikon. In a pot, boil the remaining ingredients until the salt and sugar are dissolved. Pack the vegetables in containers and cover with the brine. When cooled, cover and store in the fridge for months.

To assemble:
Reheat the chopped pork in a pan with a bit of the reserved fat. Line four bowls with rice, pickled vegetables, and chopped pork. My fridge always has a half-dozen pickled things of my own making or store-bought. I will make this with any and every pickled item I can find, including kosher dill pickles, kimchee, sauerkraut, umeboshi, radishes, sunchokes, ginger, turnips left over from a Middle Eastern meal, chilies, giardiniera, and tsukemono. You can give it a bit more balance in texture and colour with a garnish of nori and cilantro.

Serves four.

Polenta and Ragù

Rather than slowly cooking meat in a tomato sauce, you’ve already got the meat, so it’s just a matter of whipping up a fresh sauce. If you’re making the pork expressly for this purpose, it’s better to leave out that final hit of sugar when roasting.

For the ragù

In a large pot on medium heat, use the olive oil to sauté the garlic and onion until soft, about five minutes. Add the red wine and reduce until mostly evaporated. Add the tomatoes and pork. You can cook this down, but if the tomatoes are good, I prefer to keep it chunky.

For the polenta

In a large pot on medium heat, bring the liquid to a low boil (I like to use milk, but any liquid will do and I’ll happily make a vegan version with water or mushroom stock and with engevita yeast in place of cheese). Add the polenta and whisk vigorously. Switch to a flexible spatula so you can scrape the corners of the pot. Stir in butter and cheese and season to taste. Serve immediately. If you want to make this in advance, bring it back to heat gently, but know that it’ll need more liquid than you’d expect to rehydrate.

To assemble:
Portion polenta into four bowls. Top with ragù and basil leaves.

Serves four.

Y
ou know who’s perfect all the time? Superman. And even he’s spent the last seventy-five years getting his ass handed to him by Lex Luthor.

The lesson here (aside from red kryptonite with meat, green kryptonite with fish) is that we should forgive ourselves our imperfections. Most of us repress our fears that we are terrible sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, or that, professionally, we suffer to some degree from the common imposter complex. Yet we’ll trot out our feelings of failure over a roast beef for all to comment on. I’m calling BS on that. Unless you’re prepared for a full-on
My Dinner with Andre
–style examination of your life choices and motivations, put a cork in your inner monologue. At the very least, a dinner party should not be a buffet of insecurities.

The first step toward having a little confidence in your cooking is letting go of the fantasy of perfection.

THE FEEDBACK AND THE PERFECTION

 
 Do not introduce food by telling your guests that it’s no good. As crazy as that sounds, it happens all the time.

“Oh, this didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped,” says the host, handing us his or her insecurity on a plate. “It’s not very good, but the directions were confusing,” the host adds. “And I couldn’t find all the ingredients.” It’s like offering to help someone with their taxes and then telling them that you’re terrible with numbers.

If you think what you’ve cooked is bad, you shouldn’t be serving it. Food does not need to be perfect. Maybe it does in a restaurant, where you would be shocked if your server brought the food you’d ordered and told you it was no good. Home cooking does not need to be stellar. It needs to be good, hot, on time, and plentiful.

If what you’ve cooked is truly disastrous — burnt to a crisp, dried out, inedibly salty, or spoiled — then do not serve it. Pick up a phone and order a pizza, and do it without consulting your guests, because if you tell them that you’ve burned the roast, they’ll insist that it’s fine, that there’s no need to order out when you’ve worked so hard cooking. But they’ll be liars, and you’ll see it on their faces when they take a bite.

Just call in the cavalry and play it off for laughs. “Guys, I hope you like pizza,” you tell them, “because a government inspector would not let me serve this roast, even to a dog.” Tell them you called the order in fifteen minutes ago so there’s no turning back.

If you want an honest evaluation of how you did, go ahead and ask, but wait until the day after. Do not solicit critical feedback at the table. Do not ask your friends how the food is. Do not say, “No, really, tell me.”

Because you already know. If people make grunting and ooh-ing sounds, they like it. If they avoid saying anything about it, it’s passable. If they say it’s “interesting” or “unique,” they don’t like it. Absorb this and learn from it. Don’t pout. Sometimes people are so caught up in conversation that the food becomes background. This might hurt our feelings as cooks, but it’s a mark of success as hosts. Smile.

This isn’t a community college theatre class, where we go around the circle criticizing each other’s technique. That puts people on the spot. And in the end, all any host wants to hear is that everything was great. In the absence of that validation, suck it up.