Game Nights

The days that fall between Christmas and New Years have always felt a little “outside of time” for me. The hustle and bustle of holiday celebrations calms briefly and I don’t have responsibilities competing for my time. I can catch up with out-of-town friends and the recommended hours of sleep per night. I can read a book cover to cover and still remember the beginning when I get to the end. I can begin to sift through the layers of tissue paper and craft materials blanketing my floor. Or I can wait until tomorrow for that.

There’s also no better time to enjoy a game night with family or friends. I always forget how much I love playing games until I’m laughing so hard I can’t swallow that gulp of water I just took. Efforts not to snort or spit said-water then ensue.

Confession time… I’m a little competitive by nature. Part only-child syndrome, part A-type personality. Which means I wasn’t always the kid other kids wanted to play games with. Because if I won I crowed and if I lost I got really, really grumpy. Or huffy. Or sometimes just plain b*****y in the spirit of honesty. For those who grew up with me who are nodding your heads right now, I assure you I can now be quite civilized whilst playing games. But I have a secret strategy – if I get to choose the game, I typically pick one that’s more about the fun of participation than the sole object of winning. That way I avoid having to manage my frustration when I don’t win. Plus I like the game night vibe it creates.

Here are some of my favorites:

Baker on KP

Christmas time brings seemingly limitless baked goods to kitchen counters and office break rooms and church fellowship halls. I imagine pecan farmers working ‘round the clock to keep up with the chocolatiers in their Willy Wonka factory rooms. Bakers and cake decorators rubbing lotion into chapped hands after long days with rolling pins and frosting bags. Young children standing on stepstools to press a snowman-shaped cookie cutter into gooey dough. Lots of egg shells and discarded butter boxes, a thin film of flour coating kitchen surfaces, and nut pieces that escaped the counter only to crack under a shifting foot.

I’m writing this while waiting for a batch of cookies to complete their 15-minute cycle in the oven before I replace them with the next sheet. I’m settled in for a long winter’s night in the kitchen, smells of cinnamon and brown sugar dancing around my nose.

Baking is a Christmas tradition I grew up with and have every intention of cultivating for the rest of my life. Sometimes I hesitate to contribute to the cultural overdosing on carbs and sugar, but then my timer dings, the oven door opens, and I am content to keep my baker’s cap on for a while longer. Feeding people is a love language for me and love is, after all, a Christmas virtue.

Look At All The People

I've been warming up my oven for the Advent season ... there'll be some baking recipes coming over the feed in coming weeks. 

In the ramping up of the busy holiday season, I am freshly aware of how rough being alone can be, even if the solitude is broken by parties and get togethers and a year's worth of sugar consumption. As you're filling your December calendars, can I encourage you to look around amidst your regular traffic patterns for people who may be running low on nurturing? Ask them to spend an afternoon in the kitchen with you or invite yourself over for a cup of coffee. Make grilled cheese sandwiches. Ask them about their favorite Christmas memories or traditions they want to create, or let them share the tough stuff if they want to. Make them feel like family, even if it's a little awkward.

Grilled cheese sandwiches ... quick-to-make comfort food. When I'm feeling fancy I like to make them with goat cheese, fig preserves, and some julienned basil on a sturdy multigrain bread. Or a sharp cheddar with a few slices of Jarlsberg for a more traditional combo. I outgrew American singles on white bread awhile back. Lightly butter the bread slices and set the pan or griddle on a medium-low setting to give the cheese a chance to melt without burning the bread. 

Conversations: Hosting Dinner Parties

Gathering around the table can look like any number of things. It can be an impromptu weeknight of family style dishes straight from oven to table. It can be paper plates and plastic utensils. It can be dessert and a late night game of cards. And it can be dinner parties.

Dinner parties are a concept I grew up with and have seen plenty of in movies and television, but not as often practiced by my generation. By reputation, I think they have a formality to them that makes some of us shy away from hosting them. But from my experience over the past year, they are a big hit with guests. Dinner parties are a way of saying, “You are special and I’d like to prepare a nice meal and enjoy your company for an evening. And I’d like some of my other friends to enjoy your company as well.” Who’s not going to love that?!

Let’s talk about what throwing a dinner party entails … in two parts: the menu and the hosting.

Conversations: Strangers and Blind Dates

"I agree with Mary Bennet," said no Jane Austen reader ever but I am going to say it just this once. Elizabeth may have been the spunky heroine that girls relate to but Mary had her own wisdom to impart. "I think a ball is a completely irrational way of making new acquaintance. It would be better if conversation, rather than dancing, were the order of the day." Lest my dancer friends spurn me at this juncture, let me say I am not against dancing as a rule - I find it both meaningful in its artistic expression and effective in its ability to generate chemistry between men and women. But that is not my topic today or in the coming weeks. I want to start a conversation about the value of conversation.

If you were to ask me what I look for in friends or men I date, good conversation would top my list. Which makes me sound very old fashioned. Which I'm fine with. In this, I will keep company with Mary - maybe after some good conversation I may succeed in making her smile.

My favorite people are those who I've enjoyed couch conversations with or long cross-country drives. Life is at its fullest in these moments. Every conversation is a unique expression of who we are and how our experiences and perspectives relate to the other people in the conversation. Dialogue is a two-way street - I contribute and I receive. And I am known.

On a recent business trip to Nashville, I ventured out to a highly-rated restaurant, Husk. Not wanting to monopolize an entire table, I found a seat at the bar next to a middle-aged woman, also dining solo. After an hour of divine Southern cuisine and libations prepared by our blur-of-a-bartender, we were no longer strangers. Our conversation ran toward the venturing of grown children into new cities and career paths. We talked about California's water problems and trends in online dating. I found some NPR stories I'd been listening to made for quality drop-ins.

Lessons from my Mom's Kitchen: Staples

When it comes to pearls of wisdom that my mom bestowed on me, one of the best was to never try a new dish when company was coming over. It makes sense - because Murphy's Law is a real thing. Probability of errors or just plain ol' disaster increases in circumstances when I'd like to deliver perfection.

Mom repeated this wisdom often during my childhood on through to adulthood. And I have by and large ignored it. Which makes me the town idiot.

Lessons from my Mom's Kitchen: The Casserole

My mom has a recipe library. Recipes collected from friends and magazines and cookbooks over the past thirty-five years since she married my dad. She credits recipes with helping her take the leap from "heating soup, pouring cereal, or making a sandwich" to feeling at home and inspired in the kitchen. The recipe library is organized, every food category within easy reach.

I grew up in that kitchen with those recipes - we enjoyed executing what others had tested to publishable perfection. Take baking, which is more science than art ... recipes ensure that breads rise and cookies hold together properly. When I'm entertaining, I have confidence in trying something new when I have a trusted recipe source to lean on. We like recipes.

But then there was the moment my mom discovered a world apart from recipes - a world called casseroles.

Before I tell you about this moment, I think the term "casserole" has fallen out of vogue in the last decade or so and deserves a reintroduction. The etymology is from the French word for saucepan. The modern concept of "casserole" was developed in the late 1800s to describe a savory mixture of rice and meats, and evolved to describe a one-dish meal that became popular in America in the 1950s. What I'm saying is it's part of our American heritage and we should not dismiss it as plain jane kitchen fare.

So back to my mom's kitchen...

Lessons from my Mom's Kitchen: Mise en place

My mom is a cosmopolitan soul residing in a SoCal woman's body. Her Southern accent sends my imagination sweeping into a Carolina dining room or a day at the races in Virginia. While she doesn't strickly speaking speak French, to hear her pronounce most words en francais is to assume she spent years abroad in Paris. And together our varieties of British dialects, culled from hours of BBC TV and movies, call to mind a tea room fit for a Queen's service. Somewhere between her Southern gentility, French connection, and English orderliness is my mother's commitment to mise en place, putting everything in it's place. In her kitchen this means washing, chopping, measuring and otherwise prepping ingredients for a dish so that the execution of it is fairly seemless. It also extends to setting the table the night before or morning of a dinner party, setting out serving dishes and making sure the bathroom is neat so there isn't a flurry of "last-minuteness".  These are habits I'm thankful were ingrained early on - it comes as second nature to me in my own home and makes hosting much, much easier.

Closing Up Summer@No41

According to the calendar, fall doesn't start for another few weeks but in my world that season is measured more by the start of the school term and the word "September" than the weather or calendar date. Summer@No41 brought with it some truly memorable evenings and the milestone of 100 guests at the table.

With Labor Day behind us, the labors of the fall are in full swing. And my coping methods for stress are kicking in. We all have coping methods...the fact that it's a widely understood word pairing proves it. I wish my method was the practiced ability to hunker down with extreme focus and get the thing done so as to desist coping and move on to the next thing.  Sadly that is not how I'm wired. I procrastinate. Which truth be told is not a method so much as a lack of one, another activity entirely. And while I am procrastinating, I daydream. And lately that dreaming has been about opening a restaurant.

Summer@No41

I lived in Chicago for two years. Which means I lived through two winters, which was one too many. (For the record, I would not have lived through the Winter of 2013-2014.) It was because of those two years that I understand what a "season" actually is, because no, we do not have them in California. California is a perpetually confused (though beautiful) state. When I experienced my first spring, I cried. I was the slightly deranged SoCal girl who was sure the world would never be reclaimed from Jadis. And then there it was. The first green leaf. Spring Green. Crayola nailed that color...bright and untarnished, roots reaching out of packed soil to meet the sun...sorry, momentary poetic sidebar. I was in wonder. And though I experienced it as an extreme, I am quite certain most citizenry of the upper swath of North America share this moment with each other every year.

There are all sorts and lengths of the more proverbial  "seasons of life", though they seem to follow nature's seasons often enough. The poetry is famously captured in Ecclesiastes 3, which everyone knows either from Sunday School, the Byrds, or Footloose. There is a time to let things be, a time to hunker down and get a job done, and a time to lift your head up and realize you are missing from your life. And so I have been for four months. Anyone else? It is time for a return to the table @No41. Game nights. Full stomachs. Unexpected conversation topics.

I hope to see many of you @No41 in the coming weeks and months. Feel free to invite yourself over, even at a moment's notice. (Which will keep me honest about my cleaning habits which is a perk.) And I hope you will likewise think about what door you can open, what table you can meet at, what summer holds for you.

To start us off, this is my new go-to salad, compliments of Smitten Kitchen. Healthy with a surprisingly flavorful freshness that seems to hit a diversity of palates just right. It's already made two appearances this past month and it's due for several more.

If Saint Valentine Came to Dinner

I love the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" tradition ... whether real or imagined, the idea of having specific men and women across the table from you creates fascinating scenarios. So in honor of the holiday, I wonder what it would be like if Saint Valentine came to dinner at No41.

After introductions at the door, I'd start with the obvious tour of modern-day appliances and technology. Since Val (which he insists I call him though it seems very disrespectful) was martyred for his faith back in the third century, he probably isn't up on all the contemporary world has to offer. What Pandora station would he prefer? Gregorian chant? A little after his time but probably more familiar than Mumford and Sons. I'd probably stick with a simple "meat and vegetables" kind of meal to put my time-traveling guest at ease, accompanied by a bottle of Chianti (from his supposed country of origin).

What I know of Val is insubstantial. There are many legends surrounding his life, none of which have been authenticated with any accuracy. He was likely a bishop in the early church, when it was under intense persecution from the Roman Empire. There's a story of his being arrested for marrying Christian couples. There's also a story of a judge asking him to restore the sight of his blind daughter; the miracle was followed by the conversion of the family to the Christian faith. Some storytellers have added an epilogue to the scene - that upon leaving, he sent a note to the daughter signed "Your Valentine". I bet if I brought that up to my guest he would become flustered and adamantly deny any such action. Or perhaps he is a romantic after all.

Don't Knock

It was a casual Sunday night supper. We were celebrating the completion of a project and spending some well-earned time around the table as friends. I made a pot of white chicken chili (recipe below) and set out guac and chips and a tossed green salad. Like I said, casual. I'm learning how much I enjoy having dinner done when guests arrive so I can be fully present with them from the moment they walk in the door. Not always possible when I'm playing around with new recipes but it's a goal of mine. Tonight the chili was happily bubbling away when the first person came through the door.

Without knocking. She just opened the door at No41 and let herself in. The next two friends did likewise. And that colored me all sorts of happy. We've all heard the cliché "There are friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime". I'm rewriting it ... "There are friends who knock, and there are friends who let themselves in."

Second Dates

I have invited boys over to No41 for dinner on two separate occasions in the past year. It was the second date in both instances.

The first time, I made Mar-a-lago Turkey Burgers from Shauna Niequist's book Bread & Wine (a book which comes with my highest possible recommendation!). I made the patties in the morning, wrapped them up and refrigerated until dinner time. Then I threw them in a grill pan on the stovetop since No41 doesn't accommodate an outdoor grill/BBQ (not that I have a clue how to use either). We ate them over a discussion of religion and politics. If we're going with the old cliché that you never talk about those topics in polite company, we were clearly and definitively unrefined that evening. But the burgers were delicious - would definitely recommend them as crowd pleasers with just the right amount of bite.

The second time, I made two recipes that heavily involved balsamic vinegar, not thinking about the fact that it would be infused into every corner of No41 and into every pore of my body. Luckily, he was Canadian and claimed that he grew up with balsamic vinegar on everything and didn't mind a bit. Despite those reassurances, that is not a menu I will be repeating.  

Notes for future: Always think about the resulting scents of the food I prepare for guests (i.e. balsamic vinegar does not usually create the best first impression - instead go for the classic standbys of bacon or chocolate chip cookies). Do not make something that requires standing over a hot stove when I want my hair and makeup to be presentable. Don't invite boys over until the third fourth date.

Buttermilk

I am first and foremost a baker. It's the thing I most remember doing in my mom's kitchen growing up. Cookies especially, lots and lots of cookies. That kitchen also witnessed several failed attempts at Pinterest quality frosting on cakes, so much so that it became a metaphor my mom used to deliver valuable life lessons. The kitchen at No41 has seen a few photo-ready cakes but there's been just as many that I haven't taken photos of. Baking for me (and I believe for many others) is one of my favorite ways to say "I care". My heart is full as I'm measuring the baking soda and washing the third bowl. 

Which brings me to one of my favorite baking ingredients: Buttermilk. I don't pretend to understand the science behind the recipes I make but when I see buttermilk in the ingredients list, I know I will be serving up something that make people go all warm and mushy inside.

Ode to 30

Thirty was a good year. A lot of experiences, conversations, small milestones, lessons I didn't want to learn but needed to, and people. People were the best part.

I started and ended my thirtieth year with bucket list items, both of which gave me joy I can't express in words. Both had to do with the women who were around the table.