SethG

There's also Chris Blackwell, the famous Island Records exec who helped popularize reggae music in the UK.

I got the impression from somewhere that restaurants, even when "fully" booked, leave a little margin for error to allow for just the sort of dropping in Mr. Clinton tried to do. If this is true, it sure makes this incident sound like a stunt to me. Am I wrong? Isn't this also true of hotels? There's always a room, even if they're "fully" booked.

This sounds so familiar, I'm sure Xanthippe makes it--or something that's really close to it. Is it from an Italian cookbook on vegetables?? It sounds like Jack Bishop's recipe from Italian Vegetarian Cooking, I make this same recipe A LOT! Recipe, please? Warning: if reprinting copyrighted material blah, blah, blah...

Friday night: prime aged strip steak, pan-broiled, then deglazed with red wine. And rice.

That all sounds good, man, but I think you made a wrong turn as soon as you abandoned the pissaladiere. Mmmmmmmmm, pissaladiere.

Thursday dinner: Leftover fried chicken. Still pretty good the next day. And a tomato tart. Edit: could be one of my last tomato tarts of the season. Makes me sad.

So I made the tomato tart again tonight, loved the mustard, and decided it wasn't such a strong flavor after all. Then my wife says "I really like that other tomato tart better." "This one's easier," I respond, "and I think it's pretty yummy. Is there something you don't like about it?" "Too much mustard. Yuck."

So, after all that..... My friends have cancelled. The dinner, not their marriage. They waited too long to invite people, then found out some of their out of town friends wouldn't be able to make it, and... you know the story. I'm kind of bummed. I was really looking forward to it. But we talked about having it some time in December or in the spring, so I'll probably resurrect this thread when it seems certain that it's on again. (No other weekend in October works for me, and my wife and I are due to have another baby November 1.) Oh, well. Thanks for your help.

Such good planners! I am not in your league. I shop with my 19-month-old daughter only when I have to, and then we usually perform what I think of as a "surgical strike" on the grocery store. We get in, grab a couple things, and get out. Express line a must. My dinner plans are usually made in the late afternoon, and I end up having to buy stuff on the run from my job to my Leah's day care. Even when I was home on leave for 8 months with Leah, I did much the same thing. We'd make a ten minute run to the grocery store almost every afternoon. Coupons? What are these "coupons" of which you speak?

Wednesday night: I've been reading "Between Bites," and last night I used James Villas' recipe to make some authentic buttermilk-soaked, southern-fried chicken. I'd never made fried chicken at home before (except for a Penelope Casas chicken coated in Bechamel and breadcrumbs, then fried), and man was it tasty. And there was broccoli.

These are great ideas. Thank you so much, folks. Pork tenderloin, why didn't I think of that? I love pork tenderloin, and it's cheap! It may be tricky to cook properly for a crowd, though. Leg of lamb would be wonderful, and you can just roast it and forget it, but I worry that it's too expensive (although I could get the boned New Zealand leg of lamb from Costco...). Also, as I've only recently learned, most Americans don't seem to like lamb all that much. But short ribs... that may just be a winner. Keep the ideas coming. And I'll follow up with some of you privately on some of the things you've suggested.

Okay, you want some specifics, you got 'em. I've been talking to the happy couple (Time & Jennie) and we'll be meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) night for further discussions. Seating: this is not going to be difficult. They have a rather large living/dining room. It's probably 25 feet long. If they get their couch out of the way (to the side or moved to the bedroom) we should be okay to seat 20 or more people. We may need to rent some tables and chairs-- any suggestions, people? (We're talking Brooklyn, USA here.) Other equipment: if we do the sit down thing, I'm not sure we need much else. We're trying to design this so that nothing really needs to be kept hot. They already have an inherited set of dishes and flatware for 20 (!) What else do we need that I'm forgetting? Serving platters? Kitchen particulars: they have a kitchen that I would guess is about 9 x 12. (Pretty big for New York, but not for elsewhere.) They have one standard-issue (read: crappy) gas oven and four-top range. I have about the same, and I live two blocks away. We each have several feet of counter space, and some table-top space as well, but not a lot. I was originally thinking we'd do everything over at their place, but when I talked to Tim today he thought maybe we could do some work in both kitchens and make a car run as the party gets closer. What do you people think of this idea? There's obviously not enough room to cook everything at once, which is why I'm trying to design courses that can be made in advance, and perhaps many hours in advance. (And they will empty out their fridge if needed to provide space, and I may empty mine as well.) Budget: this is pretty fuzzy. When we were talking today, we couldn't even begin to put a figure on it. $20 a plate? $30? It adds up quick. What would that allow us? We don't really know. So here's where my head is at right now. I think guests should arrive to find a table or station or whatever that already has food on it waiting for them. This would be a good place for KatieLoeb's gravlax, or vegetables, or other appetizers. But I guess we'll try to make this as low maintenece as possible, while still having tasty, interesting stuff. Mixmaster b's crostini sound good to me. Prosciutto and melon. Did I mention gravlax? Is it crazy to have nothing hot at this stage? Wouldn't this work fine? Pass around some $10 Prosecco. Okay, $7 Korbell. Let people mix a bit, to the extent they can around the huge table in the middle of the room. Then, after people sit: I'll have made three or four quiches or tarts (the leek tart I mentioned above was just an example), and we'll have a huge batch of mixed greens made up. So we'll serve the quiche/tart with a salad. First course done. Then we'll have some kind of hot to warm to not so warm beef tenderloin or whatever with sauces as IrishCream suggested. I've been resisting this idea for the main course because it seems so much like every banquet or benefit or wedding you've ever been to, but hey, I guess everybody does it for a reason. 50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong. Depending on what we serve with the beef, the beef could come out of the oven right before dinner, since so far nothing else I've mentioned needs to occupy it. But I don't know what to serve with the beef. Give me ideas, my friends. Let's make it fun. Get some color on the plate. Make it more interesting. Sex it up. Give it a facelift. Help. And then Tim thinks maybe a cheese course would be cool. And I guess it is, but it seems expensive to me. Everything I've discussed so far is expensive. And dessert. We need dessert ideas, because Tim & Jennie do not want a wedding cake. They want something else, and maybe cake can play a part, but only a part. Okay, now I've done what I can to help you. Please, now, will you tell me what else to do? Edit: All y'all know I'm kidding about how you're refusing to help me, right? Your help so far has been amazing, and I thank you very much for any other suggestions you can offer me.

Monday dinner: I got some ponzu at Kam Kuo in Manhattan's Chinatown. Also picked up some frozen shrimp shumai at Kam Kuo. (The ponzu brand is Marukan, "since 1649," and it lists sudachi on the label. The same company also makes a dark ponzu with soy sauce in it.) So I planned on the shumai some salmon steaks steamed broccoli (oops, sorry Fat Guy, boiled) and rice. I improvised a sort of teriyaki marinade for the salmon steaks. I put some soy sauce, sugar and grated fresh ginger together, marinated the steaks for about ten minutes, then broiled them. Then I mixed the ponzu with a little soy sauce and a little vinegar to make a sauce for the fish after the steaks came out. Okay, I admit it: I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. So the salmon was great, perfectly done and tasty too if I do say so myself, but the marinade totally overwhelmed the ponzu in the sauce I made. The ponzu sauce actually tasted good over the rice and the broccoli, however, so it wasn't a total waste of ponzu.

You guys cook like I wish I did. You have plans! I always end up shopping at the last minute for whatever I've decided at the last minute to cook. This means I run out of my office to buy groceries while I'm on my way to my daughter's day care. Then I lug groceries, stroller, and daughter home on the subway. Then I feed my daughter right after we get home, and my wife and I don't often eat dinner before 9:00. I could use my busy work schedule as an excuse, but I did much the same thing when I was on a leave of absence with my daughter. How do you guys do it? Plan, I mean. Do you think about nutrition, a mix of foods for the week, do you rely on staples of your repertoire plus a few twists thrown in, or what? Incidentally, I've looked back over this blog twice now to find the spots in which Heather actually eats, and they're few and far between. Heather, do you always eat so little?

Heather, I started to respond with amazement about your kids eating nicoise olives and Thai food, but then checked your bio and realized that I misread your post: one of your kids is four YEARS, not four MONTHS, old. I think I might try out some gai kaprow on my Leah (19 months old), just to see how she reacts.

Okay, okay. You'll get some answers from me tomorrow. And then I want some answers from y'all. Or from all y'all, as I think I learned it in South Carolina.

Sunday night dinner: Spaghetti with eggplant sauce with tomato and dried hot red peppers. Tomorrow (or maybe the next day): something with ponzu!

Okay, time's running short, and I'm more panicked than ever, since I've resolved just about nothing with regard to the upcoming event. The above advice is helpful, but come on people! I know you're holding back great stuff.

I've been on vacation in South Carolina, on an island, with my in-laws for a week. I brought a bunch of cookbooks and spices with me, but as I should have predicted, hardly used any of them. I did try to cook a bit, but it was a large crowd (8 adults and two toddlers) so I kept it pretty simple. Mostly we ate meat. And when we grilled, someone else did the grilling. I don't know the first thing about grilling. One night we grilled burgers and hot dogs. I forget what we had with it. One night we grilled steaks, which we marinated against my better judgment in a supermarket powder package product. It was not good. We had a salad (walnuts, blue cheese and oil and basalmic vinegar) and baked potatoes with it. One night I roasted three chickens. I slid garlic and fresh tarragon (which I was shocked to find at the local Piggly Wiggly) under the skin, squeezed a lemon half over and threw a lemon half inside each bird, and just roasted 'em. And I made broccoli, corn on the cob, and my default tomato salad, which is just wedges peeled and seeded with EVOO, vinegar and a fistful of basil leaves. Another night I made chili, from the most recent Gourmet magazine (the one with the Bourdain article in it). I made it and let it mellow two days in the fridge before we ate it, and I thought it was very good. (I would definitely let it sit a couple days. I tasted it the first day and thought the spices were harsh and that the chili had no depth. That all changed with time.) Everyone else seemed to like it too. It calls for brisket instead of ground beef, which may make some people cringe, but I love brisket in just about any context so it pleased me. I also made some cornbread and fried some green tomatoes. (I was told by the fella at the farmers' market that these were actually "breaker" tomatoes, i.e., they were starting to turn red. He said he preferred breakers for frying so I bought them. I'm no expert when it comes to fried tomatos but I thought they were yummy-- and a little sinful. How can you bread and fry something as nutritious as a tomato?) We went out the rest of the nights (and it was all fish when we went out; it wasn't red meat all the time!). So that was my week of cooking. We just got home, put the baby to bed and ordered Thai food.

To clarify: I like lots of mustard. I was just saying (on the dinner thread) that if you're not such a mustard fan, you might want to cut back a little. When I make the tart again myself, I'll be using the full complement of mustard. Anybody tried the zucchini flan thing (from the same article) yet? I'm looking forward to trying it some time this week.

The tart was good. Its chief virtue was its simplicity. I brought the butter to room temp. in the microwave, then had the dough in the fridge in five minutes. And the rest took only as long as it took to slice four tomatoes. And the mustard was surprisingly tasty in this context. There's no question what it is, though. There's a lot of mustard in the recipe, and it comes through loud and clear. So if you're not a big mustard fan, you might cut down on it. (By the way, I feel bad now about what I said about Mrs. Martin, who I'm sure is quite devoted to her husband. I was just kidding around, but shame on me.)

Thursday dinner: I've been making chicken way too often, but I had chicken on the brain after reading the best chicken ever thread here, so I made chicken under a brick, with rosemary, garlic, olive oil, and lemon. And I made Marie Martin's tomato tart from this week's NYTimes dining section, because I can't seem to stop eating tomatoes. Who is Marie Martin, you ask? That's what I want to know! Who is this woman, and why did Mark Bittman feature her in his article? I keep looking the article over, trying to find something that distinguishes this person and her cooking. Seems like she's just French. And possibly Bittman's girlfriend. (No offense, Mr. Bittman, if you should read this. I know you're an eGullet member. And we liked the tart. My wife, my cousin Lisa and I gobbled it all up, lickety split. So thanks for the article.) And corn on the cob.

It's a good thing onions don't have that effect on adults, or the pyramids never would've been finished!! Many good oniony ideas here! But I'm a little surprised at the total agreement among us. I expected some garlic or tomato partisans to enter the fray.

I'll be right over!

Please explain, fifi.