Tuesday Night Dinner Party: 16 Key Lessons Learned From Slapdash Entertainment

The dawn of DoubleX inspired me to start a project in which I entertained on Tuesdays, a day I had decided unscientifically was the most inconvenient in the week. For eight months,  I doggedly slogged through regular dinner parties , fending off strep throat and fatigue as I spatchcocked game hens and brewed big pots of chili. Though I am a food writer and a former professional cook, I had shied away from entertaining because I have a tendency to overdo it. I dirty too many pans and make too many trips to the grocery store for expensive ingredients. My goal with Tuesday was to see whether I could strip entertaining down to its hospitable essence and stop worrying about all the things that were imperfect about my home, my cooking, and my behavior. There were plenty of Tuesday afternoons that I fantasized about canceling the evening’s dinner and making a date with the pizza delivery guy, but come Wednesday morning, I never regretted having had guests over. (Especially the guests who had helped with the dishes.)

1) The cheap secret of compulsive entertainers: You don’t have to hire baby-sitters.

2) Don’t forget Julia Child’s adage “Never apologize.” Much of this year has been about reducing the line between “company food” and “food” as we eat it from day to day. As much fun as cooking is, it’s important to remember that dinner parties should also be about making a connection with friends, even if the food isn’t that polished. That means that it’s OK to serve your friends a bowl of chili, or a grilled cheese sandwich, or even order out for pizza if everything else is just too much.

3) Chaos is OK. This is the great humbling lesson, of course, of parenthood—not everything can be controlled. If you invite families into your house for dinner, bedtimes will be stretched, toys will be snatched, and popsicles will occasionally make an unholy mess. I learned that it’s more important to check in with our friends over dinner than it is to have a perfectly timed meal, or impeccably sourced organic carrots, or an uncluttered dining room table.

4) Shopping is more than half the battle. Most of my streamlining has come not from cooking differently so much as shopping differently. I’m making a point of shopping from my own refrigerator and freezer, rather than running out to the local co-op for this, the farmer’s market for that, and the butcher for a random third thing. When I am at a good place for meat, I try to pick up a little extra for the freezer, and I stock up on dry goods like nuts and chocolate at Trader Joe’s. I’m also buying wine in slightly bigger quantities so that I don’t have to buy it every time someone comes over. (I still don’t have a cellar though. … That kind of forethought isn’t in me.) And, yes, I am all about the home-delivered groceries in a pinch.

5) Leeks. Leeks are my secret go-to ingredient to add sweetness and body to braised dishes, to add delicious onion undertones to soups, and to be braised as a side-dish when all I have around the house are a couple of sausages for dinner. Leeks might not be your thing , but it is essential to have a few ingredients around which will reliably delight you. (I’d also include delicata squash, bulgur, and chicken thighs in this category.)

6) Invest in oven-to-tableware. Many of the pictures from my blog have been of food cooked in my turquoise Le Creuset covered braising dish. You don’t need to get this particular pan, but I am a huge fan of cookware that can go from stovetop, to oven, to table. Not only is it easier to clean up if you’re not transferring your food from pot to dish to plate, but it also facilitates hard-to-screw-up cooking (that is, braising or its slightly drier cousin moist roasting) where your protein is nestled in with something saucy to keep it from drying out should you fail to finesse the timing. This is what Paula Wolfert’s new cookbook, Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking, is all about. (Though it should be noted that Paula’s recipes almost always require tracking down an oddball ingredient or cooking implement.)

7) Learn to love room-temperature. This lesson really came into my head as I stopped fretting about herding the kids to the table so that they could eat while their food was piping hot. They don’t care. But the truth is that many foods are delicious less than piping hot—even some pastas. Instead of trying to produce food a la minute, seek out food that does well with a little siesta before serving. Sometimes it’s the grown-ups and not the kids who are hard to get to the table.

8) Simplify. Reduce the number of dishes on the table. There’s always the next dinner party for trying something new.

9) On the other hand, there is one extra course you should not skip. Snacks are key to making entertaining easier. It might seem counterintuitive to add something to the shopping list, but a well-timed snack can make your failure to get the dinner together on time seem like a planned cocktail hour. And by snacks, I mean something between an open bag of Cheetos and a fancy tray of hand-assembled canapés. I’m talking pantry indulgences that buy you patience from your guests if your timing is off but don’t take more than three minutes to assemble. Some suggestions: dates with shavings of parmesan, good olives (warmed in the oven if you’re fancy), recently toasted nuts (I toast my walnuts with butter and a bit of Worcestershire for sheer Chex-mix nostalgia), and of course, delicious cheese.

10) The same goes for dessert. There’s nothing wrong with a one-pot meal, but people like to linger over the table, and dessert—whether that’s satsumas in a bowl or packaged cookies passed around the table—gives you and your guests a moment to breathe. I like to keep portioned scoops of cookie dough in my freezer for Tuesday nights when I’m otherwise dessertless, and I’ve become fascinated of late with very easy cake recipes (Bundt cake, picnic cake, or weekend cake, the kind of cake that’s stirred up in one bowl and in the oven in about 10 minutes). But dessert can be anything you like—it’s more about the grace period after dinner than about eating. Speaking of which.

11) There is no shame in an after-dinner DVD for the kids. Whether the kids eat beforehand or with us, they are bound to be finished with dinner before the good grown-up conversation has begun. If they are playing together nicely after dinner, that is great. But for when they don’t, a multi-age-spanning video like Curious George or Microcosmos can give kids and grown-ups alike that extra moment to relax. Also, on this note, don’t let the kids choose. The worst moments come when kids argue about the night’s entertainment.

12) Eat and cook outside when you can. Nature composts the crumbs, the kids can romp, and everything seems just a shade more festive when eaten in the open air.

13) Trays are actually really handy. I always kind of thought trays were expensive things to give to people you didn’t know all that well. But I’ve really gotten into trays this year: For busing the backyard table, for defining a snack place on a coffee table I haven’t quite organized yet, and,yes, for providing some pretty bits of color when table is a little blah.

14) In general, don’t try to introduce friends to one another on a Tuesday. When I started off this series, I hoped to have random collections of friends over, but I quickly discovered that weeknights are not the night for such socially intensive efforts. (It’s the equivalent of making cassoulet for a Monday night football TV dinner; admirable, but a little too much for the occasion.) Save your introductions for more leisurely dinners on the weekends or for cocktail parties, where people can retreat into the crowd if they aren’t quite ready to hit it off.

15) Say yes to help. You don’t have to make it a potluck, but willing friends can make it easier for you to entertain. It’s in their interest. So say yes to the proffered wine, or dessert, or best of all, dishwashing help.

16) And the most important thing I’ve learned this year is to carry on. I started entertaining on Tuesdays, admittedly because it is an inconvenient day, but in a funny way, it’s often less complicated to get people to commit to a weeknight dinner party—there are fewer out-of-town trips and conflicting events. No matter what day you plan to have people over, do it ever so slightly more often than is convenient. Entertaining definitely gets easier with practice.

I’ll keep practicing, and sharing recipes and stories at my own Website www.saradickerman.com [2]. In the new year, it will be something more than a placeholder site. I promise.