Apron Anxiety (28 page)

NEW YEAR’S
eve is a week away. I really just want to cook dinner for my parents, who have spent most of the winter redoing the Litchfield County barn and haven’t been around to taste any of my inspired dishes. Assuming everyone will have better plans, I also casually invite Beth and her husband, Tommy; Jill and her new boyfriend, Andrew; and my sister plus her date du jour to my parents’ loft. Benjy had mentioned that he was probably going upstate with some college friends that night, so I invite him, too, thinking he’d decline. But everyone immediately RSVPs “Yes!” I am a bit stunned, but quickly wrap my head around cooking for all ten of us. I’ll be hosting a smashing dinner party in six days and four hours.

Creating a menu continues to be my great pleasure, but this one needs to be extra special. It’s about time I outdo myself. Surfing for ideas on one of my favorite cooking blogs,
Food52.com
, I come across a lamb meatball recipe featuring pomegranate seeds. The color of a single pomegranate aril, my favorite shade of red and the very reason I wanted a ruby ring, inspires the party’s entire concept. I commit to that dish as my main course and find a pasta—a fusilli with toasted pine nuts and feta from the
Nigella Kitchen
cookbook—to accompany it. I’ll serve it with a spinach and fig salad. Figs are not in season, but I’m sure some place will have sweet smelling ones.

Benjy, who I’ve been a little frosty toward, kindly offers to be my sous-chef. I say sure. I’ll also put him in charge of making his signature fresh guacamole, which we’ll serve with homemade garlic pita chips. As always, I’ll cover the table with dramatic cheeses (definitely a thick slice of Mahon and the chestnut honey beseeched upon me at Fairway), and bushels of baguettes, green grapes, and smoked almonds. For dessert, I’m going to make a walnut—brown sugar torte from the
Chocolate and Zucchini
cookbook, and a three-layer red velvet cake from the
Baked
cookbook. I’ll whip up Bobby Flay’s vanilla bean crème fraîche, which will go well on both. My mother badgers me for something to contribute, so I tell her, if she must, I’d love a batch of dark chocolate clusters that I often long for, a holiday treat from my childhood. As our cocktail special, I’ll serve Nigella’s “Filthy Fizz,” made with Prosecco and Campari (presumably called that for the tainted pink color of the bubbly, or the subsequent dirty thoughts).

The day before New Year’s Eve, I go to Eataly alone to buy ingredients. I obsess over having enough food, so I snag a few boxes of freshly made focaccia at four dollars a pop. My bill is close to three hundred dollars in the end. I remind Benjy to pick up his own guacamole ingredients, since it’s his recipe and I don’t know which produce are involved. Forever frugal, he seems miffed by this, but I really don’t care. With his help, I make the meatballs that night, trusting that like most meaty meals, they’ll taste even better the next day. Though I wisely decide to accessorize them with the pomegranate seeds just before we plate.

The morning of New Year’s Eve, I wake on edge, kicking Benjy out early so I can bake my desserts in sweatpants and stress in private. My reputation as a hostess is at stake tonight, and even though I consider myself a good home cook by now,
I’m not superhuman. Cooking for all those people at Dara’s proved my competence, as far as preparation and presentation are concerned, but this dinner makes me feel a little vulnerable for many other reasons, above and beyond the food. It’s going to be a roomful of people who know me well; who know when I’m winning and when I’m wilting. They’re going to see how hard I’m trying to be happy, but that, of course, I’m still healing. It’s tricky to hide behind food, when the people you’re serving know to look past the dinner plate.

I change out of my jeans and dirty T-shirt into a knee-length, indigo slip dress that I bought in Venice Beach over the summer, and head over to my parents’. The doorbell there rings and keeps ringing. It’s a delight to see everyone, but the atmosphere quickly becomes a little frantic. My family and friends are loud and hilarious—and it’s hard to focus on completing the meal while keeping up with their charismatic stories. Plus my phone keeps vibrating on the granite counter, and I can see out of the corner of my eye that it’s Chef’s number. I am screening him against all my basic instincts. The meatballs are ready, and the pasta is cooking, and even though Benjy is helping me in the kitchen, I feel torn between giving my attention to him and to my friends, the phone, and the food. “Go catch up with everyone,” he says sweetly. “I got this.”

So I step away from the kitchen, take a deep, meditative breath, grab a drink, and try to lighten up. Even though I feel like an attractive-enough hostess, Beth, who doesn’t have an undermining bone in her body, takes one sip of her Filthy Fizz and whispers to me that she misses the inner glow I had with Chef. Her truthfulness throws me off. We’ve been extremely close for fifteen years and she doesn’t just throw words around.

“Beth,” I say sharply, sipping my cocktail and looking her straight in the eye. “You say that because you spent time with
us in the beginning, but trust me, Chef didn’t make me glow in the end. He made me cry.”

Then I remind myself to be a cool and composed hostess like Jennifer Rubell or Gwyneth Paltrow and I confess to her that I’m a little stressed, hence my oversensitivity, that I love her, and we’ll talk about everything later.

I excuse myself to the stove, and to Benjy. He’s very helpful by nature, a wonderful quality, but tonight I also sense his timidness around all the new people, and I find him seeking extra refuge by the burners. My mom takes my place to keep him company, as I refill everyone’s drinks. She really likes him—he’s passionate and peculiar, the kind of man she’d lock down for herself (or so she says) if she had to do it all over again. She’s even been handing down some antiques from the barn for his hipster-meets-hermit tenement apartment. But really she likes how he’s helped me “get over the hump” of another hellish breakup and find my balance back in New York even in his own weird way.

I ask everyone to take their seats at the festive table, which is in the middle of the open loft and looks lush with milk bottles filled with wild flowers, baskets of focaccia bread, piles of toile cloth napkins, white unscented candles, and long, willowy champagne flutes. As Benjy and I plate everyone’s dinner, Tommy, Beth’s infinitely likable husband of ten years, cracks a joke that has everyone keeled over in laughter. Benjy sprinkles the pomegranate seeds exactly so and whispers into my ear, “I’m sorry I’m not a funnier guy.” I put my hands through his great head of hair and give him a long kiss on the lips. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”
Someone will be so lucky to have him
.

Unlike Dara’s dinner party, which was family-style, tonight, Benjy and I do the plating behind the scenes. Thank God, the tones and textures of the collective dishes work as well together
in real life as they did in my head. It’s a fetching plate of food! Tiny dots of pomegranate kiss the dark and handsome lamb; curlicue fusilli is studded with flecks of pine nuts and chunky white feta; the quietly confident salad tames its counterparts’ pulsating sass.

I text a close-up picture of a plate and send it to Shellz, who is skiing in Aspen; to Paisley, who has taken to a tree house; to Liz from
People
, who’s hopefully not at the news desk; and to Anzo, Kates, and Court, who I know have struggled with the holidays since Jean’s death. I also text Dara, who’s getting engaged in a yurt; the C Street neighbors shooting Patron and praising Jesus for childcare; and all the other supportive women I wish I could spoil and surprise tonight.

It takes every bone in my body not to send the pictures to Chef, but considering how off-kilter he’s been today (having droned on and on about the unfairness of life in the five messages he’s left me), I decide against it. Baiting him would be cruel … to both of us.

Before even taking a bite, my family is visibly astounded. They admit they never believed that I could pull off an entire meal, let alone something so elegant. “I hope you eat your words!” I say, smiling. “Literally! Eat!”

This New Year’s Eve dinner turns out to be the most delicious meal I ever made. There are second and third helpings, loud moans, and by the end of the meal, every single plate is licked clean. Our brains are soaked in flavor. My friends are stuffed. My sister can’t stop smiling. The meatballs were scrumptious small wonders and the pasta was earthy and addictive. The only minor disappointment was the fig salad. I should have listened to my gut; figs just aren’t meant to be served midwinter.
Seasonal
is a real thing. But no one really noticed except me (and probably Benjy).

I sneak away to check my BlackBerry and read everyone’s reply to the food porn I sent earlier. In the course of our hour-long dinner, I see that I have five more missed calls from Chef and a text that says he’s throwing his phone in National Harbor if I don’t pick up again. He knows I’m throwing a big dinner party, but he is upset, which makes me upset. I try with everything I have to push my emotions aside. If I fall apart now, it will steal every inch of integrity I put into this monumental meal. And I’m
not
going to let that happen.

It’s just before midnight and the fireworks on the Hudson River are starting. My mother and father insist on cleaning up while us “kids” go up to the roof. Drunk and bundled up, overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, I confess to Beth and Jill that months ago on C Street, I served them banana bread with bugs in it. “You did what?!” cries Jill, a raging germophobe to began with. We are screaming and crying with laughter. My sister is entangled in her new beau, who is hopefully a better kisser than he is a conversationalist. Tommy is taking candid pictures of the bombed Jill and Beth, party-girl poses and pouring champagne into each other’s puckered lips. Benjy is quietly keeping me warm.

We have one minute left to go until 2011. Some of my parents’ neighbors, also taking advantage of the view from the roof, introduce themselves and extend their chilled bottles of French bubbly and opulent trays of berries and bonbons to us. I raise my glass, in my favorite city, with my closest friends and my well-fed family and toast, “To new beginnings!” Wiping away my runaway tears, dismissively blaming the wind, I release all the tension of the day, and maybe even the year. And then, hoping the sweetness will cut the tang, I add a raspberry to the fizz.