Wednesday, April 20, 2011

A little K & A

My favourite nudity-optional group activity -- aside from throwing rocks at children in playgrounds, of course -- is dining. Dining with friends, done properly and thus well, is a perfectly blended masala of personality, food, music and setting.

The reality, though, is that if a good dinner party is like a masterfully mixed curry, a bad one is like a re-heated TV dinner slathered with ketchup packets left over from breakfast. The minutiae of deciding whom to invite, and what to serve, and which wines to drink, and how many grams of hallucinogens per person, is simply exhausting. Add an unknown to the mix -- will Marc bring his new boyfriend? Is Stephanie still off yellow foods? -- and it's no wonder dinner parties are rare and frequently disappointing.

If logistics makes having an omnivorous dinner party difficult, having a vegan dinner party is even harder.

It's easy enough for the carnivorous. They just buy an obscenely large hunk of dead animal and cook it. Give the flabby-florid-faced-flesh-eaters enough medium-rare dead cow and they'll forgive over-cooked previously-frozen vegetables, uninspired starches and bottled salad dressings.

Vegans tend to be a snivelling and flatulent lot, and they're bitter to boot, so a bit more effort is needed just to break through the sullen shell of self-righteousness that protects most of us from reality. At least feeding vegans or vegetarians allows the host to touch base on tradition and ring the changes across the canonical dishes of our sub-culture.

"Oh, I just love what you've done to this Lima bean and cabbage casserole, Susan. And that braised tempeh is just perfect!"

Yawn.

The few whom I call my friends, though, would be most unimpressed by such lacklustre efforts whether the food was vegan or not.

It's simply stressful when one invites people into one's home and offers them food from one's own hands. My lovely wife will laugh and tell me that "normal" people don't think like this -- what do you mean, people don't care about the depth of their soup bowls? How can they not? -- but for me, cooking for my friends is performance writ small, a tiny theatre of the senses where every technique is judged, every choice critiqued and every bite assessed. It's intimate and yet frighteningly impersonal, like having sex in front of a panel of Olympic judges with those score card things. My lovely wife says this, also, is not how normal people think. She may be right.

I was a cook and a chef for many years. I have fed five course meals to groups of 300 people and 12 course meals to groups of 40. I have fed governor generals, movie stars, mobsters and tax accountants.

But when I'm feeding my friends, I stress. This might be because I have profound yet un-diagnosed mental health issues or -- or! -- it might be because my friends are sophisticated and amazing and generally high maintenance freaks who expect and deserve a culinary experience worthy of my love for them.

In addition, I am unwilling to entertain the idea that any of my friends might actually not care about what I feed them or -- quelle horreur! -- actually prefer a simpler dish. Such people would certainly never have made it past the background checks and interviews.

Case in point: whereas the ideal recipe for obese meat-eating sweaty-armpitted plebeians might include:

  • three to five easily bought ingredients,
  • five or six minutes of prep time,
  • one pot or pan maximum, and,
  • no more than 30 minutes of total effort,

dishes for my food-obsessed bons amis shall instead consist of
  • many obscure and/or illegal ingredients,
  • several days/weeks/months of prep time,
  • two or more new cooking utensils and/or single-use gadgets (preferably purchased in situ), and,
  • at least -- at least -- a working knowledge of Urdu, Mandarin, Thai or Hmong.

A demanding crowd, one might suggest.

Some of my friends might object to this characterization.

"No, no, not us... we're simple folk with simple tastes," they'll purr, manicured fingers knowingly caressing a fig.

Ha. Liars. One may not choose one's family, only one's friends, it is said. This is simply wrong, an inane aphorism coined by a moron. One's friends are not chosen but are instead an inescapable consequence of one's life. I'm thankful that my life choices have led me to the friends I have, and I treasure my friends, but simple they are not.

I am having two amazing and sophisticated women over for dinner this week -- which will simply add to, but not overshadow in any way the amazing and sophisticated babe-a-licious wife I am blessed with -- and I'm stressing about the menu. I want to serve something that will be absolutely perfect for the occasion and I vacillate between tried-and-true (that I know will be good but also runs the risk of being predictable) and never-before-tried (that might entirely flop BUT could also be a totally perfect orgasmic degustation).

Both are complex meals, of course, and both involve lots of prep work. Since I'm having them over on Friday, and today is Wednesday (okay, actually really early Thursday morning), I had better get on with it.

More afterwards...

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