The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [102]
I had planned to go to the supper club with Amelia, but when she came down with a cold the day of and couldn’t make it, I called up Matt. When I arrived at Kara’s brownstone by bike, Matt was already hanging out with other guests in the backyard, with a glass of wine in hand. The supper club had sent out a reminder e-mail that day with a brief sentence about each of the dinner’s ten guests, which we had provided earlier that week. But I hadn’t had a chance to tell Kara and Adam about my last-minute date switch. I was relieved to see that they were so laid-back, though, welcoming Matt inside once he simply announced that he was my “alternate.”
Unlike Whisk and Ladle’s closed-off cooking process, the guests at Ted and Amy’s Supper Club seemed to be pretty welcome to help out in the kitchen. At least, they were invited to help if they were willing. While watching Adam grill up some mango chicken sausages, I noticed he was having a difficult time flipping them on the grill without them tearing. I stepped over and offered to help, and together we quickly pried the sausages from the blazing grill before they became too burned. We concluded that they were sticking because of the extra sugars in the sausage from the mango, and because they were so lean. The grill needed to be oiled well beforehand. I was a little cautious about overstepping my role, since Adam was after all a trained chef, but he seemed truly grateful for the extra hand. After the main course had been saved, we relaxed with a clink of our beer bottles.
After a thoroughly enjoyable dinner of grilled sausage and vegetable skewers, grilled corn on the cob with the charred frays of husk protruding from the plate, savory black beans, and a yogurt and blackberry panna cotta dessert, I had made several lasting friends and even earned an invitation to come back and cook with the group. The ambiance of Ted and Amy’s dinner was less formal than that of Whisk and Ladle’s, and the number of guests was small enough that we could all engage in the same conversation.
After I wrote a blog post about my supper at Ted and Amy‘s, I was invited to a dinner by another supper club, this one, called SocialEats, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The eight-person dinner was a casual, modest affair, perhaps even more so than Ted and Amy’s, hosted by a husband-and-wife team who were lawyers by day but passionate about cooking at home. They also dined at the same table as the rest of the guests, as at Ted and Amy’s, and since roughly half of the eight people at the table already knew one another, it felt a little bit more like a traditional dinner party.
During the long subway ride back to Brooklyn after the dinner that night, I began thinking about how I would invent my own supper club. Mine would be different from each of these, somehow.
It was May. On one of the first warm Friday nights of the spring, warm enough to warrant the first barbecue of the season, I found myself on Matt’s rooftop patio in Williamsburg. We had just finished taping a first-ever video for my blog. Matt had by then begun a new job working as a freelance videographer and was eager to create more videos to add to his reel. On a lark, I had decided to submit an amateur video for a new television show on the Food Network. A friend of mine, Darin, was a producer for the new show Ask Aida and encouraged me to make a video in which I ask the show’s host about a cooking-related dilemma. The basis of the show was that the host, Aida Mollenkamp, would then solve the problem through her culinary expertise.
My particular dilemma, however, was a little outside the realm of basic kitchen skills.
After several cuts due to mess-ups and giggling, I stood in Matt’s kitchen and told the camera, “Recently single, and on the rebound, I’ve been thinking about what to cook on a date.”
I went on to ask Aida what types of foods or dishes might be considered aphrodisiacs,