The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [75]
“Cool shoes,” he said, nodding at my pink Keds.
I smiled and thanked him. After a brief pause, he went back inside. I realized that if there had ever been a good opportunity to mingle with this crowd, I had just missed it.
Things didn’t get much better once Becca arrived. We struck up a conversation with one of the girls cooking in the kitchen, but as it was her first time cooking for the event, she didn’t have much to say about it. At one point Becca was rudely shrugged off when she asked another girl if she could take pictures.
Once the food was all prepared and set on a table in the living room, everyone lined up to fill their plates. Becca and I sat down on a couch to eat. My plate had four dishes, squashed together: a potato gnocchi covered in tomato sauce, a tofu dish with a sweet-and-sour sauce, a heap of salad heavy on the shredded carrots and fennel fronds, and a mixed veggie side that resembled ratatouille. We were told in a brief announcement before dinner was served that most of it had been freeganed, except for some purchased ingredients like spices or flour, and all of it was vegan.
There were at least forty people at the dinner that night, in various rooms and even on the rooftop. Though Becca and I enjoyed watching the meal being cooked and eating it, we left without making any lasting contacts. This was mostly our faults, but we sensed an exclusive vibe from some of the characters there. When we were finished eating, we turned our attention to a commotion in the center of the room. A girl clad only in a bra and jeans was wrestling with a guy, and they stumbled into the room laughing and squealing. They suddenly crashed onto the floor in a heap and then continued to roll around on their backs, cackling. Becca and I looked at each other and silently agreed it was time to go.
The bigger a dinner gets, the less intimate the experience, I left the event thinking. I always preferred smaller gatherings to big ones anyway, at least as long as good people and good food were involved.
As the Fall Harvest Feast approached, Matt, Karol, Maia, and I realized we were looking at about twelve to thirteen guests in all. It seemed like an easy number of mouths to feed. Twenty pounds, once you subtracted the bones and entrails, might not be a huge amount of bird. But we were planning to pull out all the stops with the side dishes and desserts. Matt had a pumpkin succotash in mind, in addition to a vegetarian stuffing prepared outside the bird. Karol wanted to make some healthy sauteed greens along with her decadent dessert pie. Aside from some obligatory potatoes, which Maia would prepare, we needed more sides to fill out the spread. So Matt called on me to whip up another dish, three days before the event.
I couldn’t promise one, I told him. I was already making the bird, my own stuffing, and the gravy with the turkey drippings. I didn’t see how I was going to manage something else in the same day What’s more, there wasn’t enough room in Maia’s oven for a twenty-pound turkey, not by a long shot. She also needed it to bake her biscuits and dessert. I would have to roast the turkey in my own home kitchen, and then cab it over to Maia’s for the dinner. The cooking part for me sounded pretty lonely.
I also had a technical glitch