plate it up

doing less and getting so much more

If you’re like me, the recent East Coast polar vortex has probably thrown off any and all best-laid plans. My car currently sits buried under a snowbank. I made multiple attempts to free her — snow shovel, garden shovel, kicking hopelessly at the ice crust — before admitting defeat. For now, I have put myself at the mercy of tromping through the snow and the generosity of whoever will give me a ride.

I did make some half-hearted efforts to prepare for the storm, a hodgepodge of attempts at the things people tell you to do when natural disaster may be on the way. The Thursday before the snow was supposed to start, I went to Harris Teeter to try and stock up on groceries. By then, the stores were already picked over. I walked through the produce aisle and stared at everything, and finally put a cabbage in my cart. My partner asked me what I was going to do with it. I had no idea. All I had was a sense that cabbages are hearty vegetables, and one could survive in my fridge until I had more of a plan.

That Friday, we went over to our friends’ place for dinner and cards. Usually, whoever hosts will cook dinner, but one of them texted us in the morning to say that the nearby grocery store was a “madhouse” and asked if we’d be ok with ordering in. Not a problem at all, especially from one of our favorite Peruvian chicken places.

By dinnertime, I completely forgot about his warning and sent my partner to the same Whole Foods on the way over to get ice cream in case my dessert was a flop. While they still had my favorite Van Leeuwen flavor — honeycomb — the line for self-checkout stretched around the entire store to the meat department.

As we finally sat down to styrofoam boxes of chicken and fried yucca, my friend stood up and said we should still be using serving plates. I thought he was joking at first, but he went over to a storage bench and pulled out a beautiful platter, laying the chicken out on it and passing it around. We opened a bottle of orange wine from my wine club subscription, refilling each others’ glasses over the course of the night. It felt no different than any other dinner party, gathered around with people I love spending time with and eating something so good.

My emergency snowstorm cabbage has sat untouched in the fridge through now. I gave up trying to think of something to do with it, so please share any and all cabbage recipes. Instead, when we finished the one meal I had the foresight to prepare during the storm and its icy aftermath, my partner and I decided to order more Peruvian chicken, this time from a place within walking distance of our house that only required one stretch of penguin shuffling over packed-down snow and sleet. It made for great lunch leftovers the next day.

On my fridge, there’s a magnet I bought as a joke a few years ago. It has a cartoon of a woman in a kitchen apron, beaming as she serves dinner. The caption reads, “Take out! So easy! So fast! So much more delicious!”

These past few days, as all my plans and everyone else’s seemed to fall apart in the cold, I can’t help but wonder what else she knows.

xx,

Annie

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low-key hosting

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it is that makes me love hosting so much. There’s the days of elaborate preparation, the excitement of trying new dishes, the relief of having a built-in audience of people to consume recipes that at their most scaled-down will still serve a minimum of six to eight people. I love the challenge of pairing a cocktail to a party theme, of piecing together side dishes and mains and finding the overlap of ingredients and running the whole production with zero waste.

But more than anything, I just like hanging out with my friends with no pre-determined end time, letting the conversation linger until someone inevitably gets sleepy and the night winds down. One of my friends has said that her goal is to do more low-key hosting, and I’ve loved all the times she’s spontaneously had people over for takeout and games.

I tried to follow that to an extent last year, and I liked some of what I tried, such as:

• ordering the main meal, but making a fun appetizer or dessert

• putting my efforts into tending bar with fun drinks, and letting someone else decide the food

• buying a huge spread of frozen appetizers from Trader Joe’s and Costco and air-frying it all right before people get there

Would love to know your favorite ways of getting people together, especially when all good plans go up in the air!