Dinner Disaster?
Dinner guests are arriving in 20 minutes and you are just getting out of the shower. Not only have you not prepared the dinner, you’re not even quite sure what you are going to serve. The day has been a complete disaster and you are way behind schedule. This could be a stressful moment.
Stop, take a deep breath and relax. Remember that the evening is supposed to be fun and dinner enjoyable. Don’t panic, don’t call for pizza, don’t turn out the lights to pretend you’re not home. They’ll see your car outside.
First, sweep everything off the dining room table and throw on a clean tablecloth. Next, get the white wine you wisely keep in the refrigerator and place that on the table. Grab the red wine from under the counter and open it. Pour yourself a drink. Now you can put the open bottle of red wine and the corkscrew on the table beside the white.
Opening the red wine ahead of time not only allowed you to have a calming drink but also allows the wine to breath, softening the flavors. Given the quality of red wine you had under the counter this is probably irrelevant but makes it look like you know what you’re doing.
Now for the really important part.
Put olive oil in your fry pan with the heat on medium-low. Finely chop a few onions and add to the oil. Add salt and black pepper and allow to simmer while you squash a few cloves of garlic. Turn the heat down to its lowest setting before adding the garlic to the olive oil and onions. You don’t want the smell of burnt garlic in the house.
By this time you should have a couple of minutes before your guests arrive. Relax and enjoy your wine. When they come through the door you will have found the rest of the wine glasses and be able to pour everyone a drink. You will appear relaxed, the house will smell wonderfully of slowly simmering olive oil, onions and garlic and everyone will think you’ve already prepared a spectacular dinner.
It doesn’t really matter whether you haul out the chicken breasts or that nice bit of fish you’ve got in the refrigerator. At this stage, if you’re comfortable with your guests or have already polished off the second glass of wine, you can even admit that you’re not really fully prepared and ask your guests what they would prefer and if they would like to help. You can probably enlist someone to help prepare the salad and cut up a few vegetables while you figure out what you are going to do.
What really matters is that you enjoy the company and the process of preparing the food. Now that you and your guests are relaxed you can focus on the sauce you are going to invent from the onions, garlic and olive oil and the presentation of the dinner. If you are “sauce challenged” or overwhelmed with terror at preparing dinner on the fly, I’ll be dealing with these subjects in later articles.
In these articles I will be talking about food – from growing through cooking and preparing to eating. I will also be talking about my own personal journey as I move away from having a beer and boca in my local bar or preparing pork smothered in rich sauce at home and move toward a diet that contains more of the fresh raw food taken straight from my own organic garden.
I don’t presume to tell anyone else how to cook. How you prepare and present food and what ingredients you use is a very personal choice. What I’m suggesting is that you step out of the box of pre-planned menus and recipes and give yourself the freedom to innovate. Some of you, like my partner Jan, may not even like cooking. This approach may get you started.
Preparing interesting, even exciting, meals for guests or just for yourself does not need to be ordered, organized, controlled and measured. It can be fun, spontaneous and creative. Every meal can be a totally new adventure and you get to enjoy the food AND the process.