Tuesday Night Dinner Party: Two food critics get to know each other over an unclever salmon meal.

The whole point of Tuesday Night Dinners is to expand my social universe beyond just my closest friends, and preferably to do it with marked insouciance. But I still find myself unexpectedly nervous when serving friends at my house for the first time, particularly when the new friend is J., a fellow food critic. He reviews restaurants for a local weekly, and we’d regularly run into each other in new restaurants back when I was regularly reviewing for Seattle magazine. (There has been a time or two, I should note, where the majority of patrons in a new restaurant are critics—we nod gingerly, trying not to blow anyone’s cover.) Anyway, after a few discreet hellos, J. and I started catching up for occasional off-duty coffees, and with the advent of Tuesday Nights, I thought it would be nice to get to know him a little better over dinner. I am trying to learn to be OK with the imperfections in my food, my home, and my manners, but looking at the spilled sippy cups that Adele has trailed in her wake, Andrew’s motorcycle bag on the dining room table, and my own kitchen crumbs, I fret about what J. might think if I don’t get most of it hidden away. I do end up cleaning for half an hour, not really well enough for the house to look clean, but at least it’s not too hazardous.

I was actually less worried about the food than you might think, given that J.’s job is to seek out culinary flaws. When I had regular reviewing gigs for Seattle magazine and the Stranger, I found myself craving home-cooked food—even mediocre home-cooked food—and I figured J. feels the same way. It is great, if a little wacky, to eat for a living, but there can be something so unrelenting about restaurant food: the endless tartares and lamb chops, the sushi joints that blur together. When food is cooked specifically for you, with no financial motive, it tastes better, even if the actual execution is clumsy. What’s more, there are certain foods that you can serve more easily in a private home than at a restaurant—a whole side of salmon, say, or a roast, or a sloppy, delicious stew.

In this case, home cooking also gave me the freedom not to be clever, as chefs feel compelled to be. I served the ultimate Seattle food cliché: wild Alaskan salmon. Since I was in the mood for fish, and our local markets don’t have exemplary seafood counters, I had driven 15 minutes south of our house to a good fishmonger. I’d wanted sardines (cheap, delicious, relatively mercury-free), but the store was out, and I couldn’t resist the coral flesh of the sockeye, which was at the height of the season and slightly cheaper than its storied cousin, king salmon.

It was a good thing I was preparing an easy dish, since I was slightly butterfingered this night—I had in mind working up a slightly tangy breadcrumb sauce for the salmon, using the end of a dark pain au levain I’d let go stale. In my mind, it would get all brown-ly roasty-toasty and a little tangy from mustard and shallots at the same time. The sauce actually tasted nice—it’s worth exploring in the future. But I couldn’t thin it out enough, and it just kept soaking up oil, becoming more and more epoxylike as I worked. And so the salmon went sauceless.

The kids, on the other hand, were saucy, and the baby bonked her head while I was attending to the grill and my husband was watching her, so she came outside to me in high hysterics. I jiggled her and the vent on my Big Green Egg at the same time. (I’m sure you’re not supposed to do that, but I held her on my far hip, so she only got mildly smoky.) I wanted to cook the salmon over a really low fire, but I’d lost track of the grill, and could only get it down to about 300 Fahrenheit, not the ideal 225 Fahrenheit or so. It was good enough, since salmon is full of oil that keeps it from drying out. I’d sprinkled the fish with a little dill, and I threw some woodchips on the coals for extra flavor. We also had a grilled zucchini and feta salad that couldn’t be simpler, and for dessert, David Lebovitz’s excellent, mink-colored buckwheat cake.

Tags: buckwheat cake, dill, feta, olive oil, salad, salmon, Seattle, stale bread, tuesday night dinner party

Sara Dickerman has written about food for Slate, the New York Times Magazine, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, and Seattle magazine.

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Tuesday Night Dinner Party: Two Pro Foodies and an Unclever Salmon