Maddogswif has been so busy for the past few years that we all but stopped throwing dinner parties. For years before that we threw lots of parties every year. I only remember a few parties with fewer than 12 guests most were much larger about 20, and a few were over 40. That actually takes a good amount of experience to get right. In a normal year we might have held 15 -20 dinner parties, a really good year perhaps 24, and on a few years we had to inform the wife that it is inappropriate to throw parties on back to back weekends for more than 2 weeks in a row. Since Maddog is the chief cook, dinner planner, mixologist, and bottle washer, it gets a bit grueling to host parties weekend after weekend.
Simple backyard parties are the exception, especially if the menu is tight and simple, and kitchen cleanup and dishes are minimized. We were over at Newmark's Door and noticed this very funny post: "All The Comments on Every Recipe Blog" Go read it. This pretty much is how the table conversation goes when we throw a party with specific guests. At first it was distracting, now I view it as some sort of surreal, improv comedy routine. I remember one time we were serving spaghetti and meatballs. This is a truly simple dish, and one of our guests asked if she could substitute tofu. It made me laugh out loud, but I countered with the recommendation to use cut in half fresh small (quarter sized) mozzarella balls. The idea we left her with was to separate the sauce, return 1/2 of the sauce to flame, add pasta, and toss to coat, add the halved mozzarella balls, toss again, plate, add meat balls, sauce the plate, and garnish with cheese, and chopped fresh parsley and basil. Tofu? The texture is wrong for this. As the complexity of the dish increased, so would the complexity of the inane substitutions. For a while we became obsessed with seeing how far this could go. It didn't last long, the meal complexity drained quite a bit of the fun out of the prep time. Anyway, we found the post amusing.
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