Collaborative cooking versus have-everything-good-to-go-when-your-guests-arrive

I’m a fan of collaborative cooking – partly because I love alliterations and partly because it takes the pressure off. What I mean by this is that my preferred way to host is to invite a friend over and figure out how to make something new together. What’s an even bigger challenge for me (and if I’m being honest, what I almost never even try) is the have-everything-good-to-go-when-your-guests-arrive style of hosting.

A few weeks ago, we had some friends over. These pals had hosted us about a year ago, and so I was already feeling bad about the delay in returning the favour – I couldn’t risk a delay in serving food now that they would finally be in my home. I planned early and thoroughly:

The menu

As learned last week, I picked a straight-forward menu that could mostly be prepared before hand from Cookie and Kate recipes Roasted Butternut Squash Tacos and Herb Red Potato Salad. My friend volunteered to bring a green salad, so I was off the hook for that. I had never made either of these recipes before, but picked them because except for the roasted butternut squash in the tacos, each element could be served room temperature, maximizing my prep time and minimizing my mealtime work.

(A quick side note about this potato salad – it is amazing. I ended up making it again two days later to bring to a pot luck BBQ. A summer staple for sure. )

While these main seemed manageable, I still needed a backup plan in the form of appetizers. Should dinner take longer than planned, I could at least keep my pals satiated. I picked out some appetizers the only way I know how – googling “easy appetizers”. I settled on Garlic-Herb Pinwheels and Heirloom Tomato Bruschetta.

How it turned out

Butternut squash taco leftovers. I’ll be the first to admit that if I plan to keep up this food blog I’m going to need to improve my food photography.

If you’re judging based on the have-everything-good-to-go-when-your-guests-arrive style of hosting, this evening was a major success. I was just plating the final bruschetta as I noticed my friends walking down my lane-way. The potato salad and black bean coleslaw for the tacos was prepped and the butternut squash was in the oven. Hell, I’d even started clean-up.

What I didn’t think about, until it was in front of my face, was how every single menu item was carb-based. Sure there were vegetables, but do butternut squash tacos really need a side of potato salad? And should that meal be prefaced with puff pastry and thick bread? My obsession with making sure everything was ready on time drove me to create an easy and straightforward meal while ignoring how it’d all come together.

Lessons learned

• Plan ahead and pick things that don’t need to be serving piping hot.
• Never listen to Martha Stewart when she recommends you tear bread for bruschetta – it will not look nice.
• Be mindful of how the overall meal will come together to ensure balance.

If you can conquer pasta you can conquer anything

I have been majorly slacking on this initiative for a number of reasons – some good ones, some bad ones, but ultimately not interesting ones. So rather than writing a mea culpa about my blog negligence, I’m going to move onto bigger, better, more impressive things: I conquered homemade pasta.

Welcome to my home! Dinner will be served in approximately 4 hours.

I’ve made pasta a few times before to varying levels of success. It usually tastes good, but as with most kitchen endeavours of mine, the meal is served significantly later than planned and an egg almost makes it to the floor.

The lighting in this photo is good because we took it at 10:30 p.m. and had to rely on candles. 

My most notable attempt was this past October when a good friend joined to make use of my recently acquired pasta machine. Together, we had picked out this amazing Winter Squash Carbonara, only with homemade noodles and added scallops. Go big or go home, as they say. We ate at 10:30 p.m.

Reflecting now, there are a lot of reasons this happened. I didn’t do any prep work (oops); I had never tried the recipe (my bad); I visited my parents out of town the night before (I’m sure I had a good reason); and I “forgot” to pick any ingredients until two hours before my friend was to arrive. In retrospect, it was a recipe for disaster – pun intended.

A goal without a plan is just a wish

Recently, having recovered from our previous attempt, this same friend and I decided it was time to give it another go.

The plan was to walk home together this past Thursday, make some mojitos, then make the noodles and enjoy the start of a long weekend. I was excited, but with this friend joining me immediately after work, I knew I couldn’t make the same mistakes again.

I picked a recipe I had tried before: Linguine with Shrimp and Lemon Oil. I had made this for dinner last summer, and knew it would be a delicious. More importantly, I knew what was involved in making it and that it would be relatively straight forward to pull off with someone in the kitchen alongside me.

The fruits of our labour – homemade pasta with lemon infused olive oil, parsley, scallops – and a side of bread and cheese.

I swapped the shrimp for scallops, knowing that peeling shrimp would add an unnecessary step to preparing dinner with a friend over. Perhaps most importantly, I made a written down list of what needed to be done and in what order to pull this dinner together. I also popped into the Bulk Barn and picked up semolina flour – known to be perfect for making pasta and picked a recipe that had “basic” in the title.

Small changes, big impacts

These things seem small – and they are. But they truly made a difference. My friend and I enjoyed our meal by 7:30, had most of the clean-up done by 8:30 and by 9 we were on my back stoop enjoying a beautiful summer Rose and a full tummy.

More importantly, I didn’t spend my time apologizing about how late we were eating, panicking about whether the food was going to turn out, or distractedly working away while ignoring my guest. And that, my friends, is progress.

Lessons learned this week

• Plan ahead
• Know your recipe
• Make the extra effort to get the perfect ingredients (shout-out to the magic of semolina flour!)

Why did I drop that frittata?

I had planned to write this two hours ago, but the goal of this blog is to talk about home cooking, and so three hours ago it made complete sense that I would do some home cooking first. And of course I had anticipated the home cooking would take one hour. And of course it took three.

Two servings of my roast fire. No, I’m kidding. This is the calm after the cooking storm.

This is how cooking works for me. I love food, and I love the experience of preparing it and I love the experience of sharing it with friends. I love a well-lit room, whether a restaurant or my kitchen/dining/living room in my tiny apartment. I think I’m good at it. I think I’m a good cook, that is. I’m a welcoming host.

What I am not, is a good planner. I’m constantly missing things from my grocery list, underestimating the amount of time it’ll take me to cook something, and leaving a destroyed kitchen in my wake. “The recipe says 20 minutes, so I’ll leave myself 30.” Flash forward to two hours and it’s something like “Shit, sorry guys, this should be ready any minute. I just need to finish up this one quick thing.”

The challenge: Be better at home cooking

And so, I’m going to embark on a little challenge. To better understand how to eat-in – both the mundane Tuesday night dinner, and the exciting Friday night entertaining.

I had originally intended to put a lot of stringent boundaries on myself: no eating out, only eating whole foods that I can trace, etc. etc. etc. But that’s not what I want this blog to be about. Instead of restrictions, I want to focus on the process – be it a quick thrown together meal, or a four-course masterpiece. There’s a running joke that I’m either eating a bowl of cereal or stretching my culinary skills to their maximum. I want to explore finding the middle ground – while not denying who I obviously am at my core (someone who once contributed to a Global TV piece on National Grilled Cheese Day).

What do I love about eating in? What do I love about cooking for friends? How can I get better at both? And why did I almost drop that frittata on the floor in front of my friends when I’ve pulled it off a dozen times when there were no witnesses?