Both my mother and father come from large families of five. I am an only child. This creates tension every Christmas or Thanksgiving when large amounts of cooking are involved. To offset said culinary overdose, the extended family would gather at someone’s house, sometimes ours, and there would be at least twenty people, including the children. The best dinner parties were organized by a military wife cum aunt. She would have a whole turkey, stuffing, gravy, green bean casserole, and three types of pie for dessert. For Christmas, there was sometimes a goose, but always a chocolate cake. The shining achievement of the meal however was not a food item. A fir tree, usually the largest on the lot, sat in the background as an imposing guest in its own right. The grand dinner parties of my youth made me want to throw one of my own, but for college students.
Reality and my expectations however, were on two different planes of existence. A dorm kitchenette cannot compete with a house that has more than three pans to its name. I asked a friend, Clare, if I could borrow her kitchen to cook instead, where she had two refrigerators and enough plates for all the people I wanted to invite. Her one request was to include all her housemates in the final number of guests. Including many of my friends, the total number of people planned for was twenty five. Nonetheless, a good hostess knows that about half the people invited won’t show up. To test the theory I created a Facebook event, where if one didn't RSVP, they didn’t get food. In the end, eleven people came, though not the all of original eleven who said they would, as two guests were friends of friends.
Part of the difficulty of cooking for said college students is my own lack of a car. For this, I needed the help of my friend Emily, and her rusted out mom-esque soccer van. She, and her not so trusty steed, was someone I could count on, as we had been on many theatre adventures together. Because of the number of guests, and my desire to keep the cost of feeding people low, I wanted to go to Meijer. I got a call on Saturday from Emily if I wouldn’t mind going shopping then, instead of Sunday like we planned. Hence for the Monday night meal I had a two day in advance shopping run.
For some reason, Emily and I thought it would be a good idea to share a split tier cart. While she was in the cereal aisle, I would be in the salad dressing aisle. We played a game of text tag, Were R U?, which was more fun for me than her because I had the cart. By the time I had everything I needed, salad packs, fettuccine noodles, alfredo sauce in cans, frozen shrimp and peas, garlic bread, gelato, and milk, and by the time Emily had everything she needed as well, the cart was stuffed to bursting.
“Do you really need a whole gallon of milk?” she had asked while shoving around groceries.
“Of course!” I replied. “It’s for both cooking and drinking.”
Emily had given me the side eye at that, and motioned for us to self check out. In the end the total for everything was fifty three dollars, which wasn’t too bad for eleven people. What I didn't truly think through was how much of a logistic problem cooking would be, for I had invited two vegetarians, one vegan, and and a girl allergic to shellfish, Emily.
On Monday night, I got started at 5:30 for a 7:00pm meal time. In hindsight, that was too early and I was fretting about the food getting cold because I was cooking in stages. I knew I was going to cook the vegan food first, so it wouldn’t get ‘contaminated’ with dairy products everyone else could eat. I used vegan soy ‘butter’ to sauté the onions, and the smell of garlic permeated the kitchen. In the ‘normal’ meal when the onions were clear, I would add one bag of frozen shrimp. At this point, my friend Clare butted in to avoid doing homework. She took over stirring, while I worked on the sauce. I drained the pasta into a colander, and raised it with cold water and put it aside.
Into the pan went two cans of Ragu cream sauce, some milk to thin the sauce, and a helping of paprika and oregano. Meanwhile, Clare was faithfully stirring, and had added another bag of shrimp in the first. I threw the bread in the oven and looked at her. The vegetarian and vegan sauce additions of onions and peas were resting in their own dishes.
“When do I add the peas?” she said.
“Is the butter boiling?” I responded.
“Yesss?”
“Now then,” I had said.
I then added the sauce to the pasta, and mixed it together. My friends had the set the table and by then, dinner was ready. There were Christmas lights, but no grand Christmas tree. At a table normally used for studying, we squished two chairs each at the heads of the table, and five chairs on either side and everyone was to serve themselves family style. The concept was one would take a serving of pasta and then add the appropriate topping. The salad and garlic bread were on the table in a free for all. We all settled down to eat and I looked around at the strange conglomeration of people my meal brought together with, Emily on my left and Clare on my right. There were only two men at the table and the avocado green walls seemed to suck the light from the room, creating a darker atmosphere than I would have liked, but it was my dinner party and my fettuccine shrimp alfredo on the table.
The first bite was good, but under salted. The noodles were well done, and had a soft texture, but the sauce tasted of milk. The shrimp had shells that need to be peeled, and left the stink of shellfish on the hands. The best part were the buttery peas and the soft crunch of onions, which lent a strong flavor to a dish that needed a little contrast. I realized by trying to please everyone with dietary restrictions, I had limited my cooking ability by spreading myself too thin. Nonetheless, the choruses of “it’s so good!” served to bolster my flagging spirits. As I looked around the table, I realized it was less about the food, and more about the friends I had. But dinner still needed salt.
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