The Tale of the Dinner Party

It had come to my attention last week that I had not really done much grilling this summer. The past few summers I'd invite people over at least a few times, throw some food on the grill, and do some serious eating. This summer...not so much.

So I decided to rectify that by doing the grilling thing over the weekend. I sent out an email to some people, and started thinking of ideas. I was considering a pork loin recipe I found online.

However as the week went along, more and more people expressed interest in participating. Now, from past years my experience has been that you invite however many people anticipating that only a certain percentage will show up. That's how the math usually works. This time around, the percentage of interested parties was over 100. How does that work, you ask? There were additional invites after the first round as the subject came up with other people. At the highest count, it looked like a possible 15 people showing up.

Oddly enough this caused a little bit of a panic to set in. Mainly for two reasons. 1) The pork loin I had considered making was only good for maybe 4-5 people and 2) My apartment is big, but not that big; where the hell was everyone going to sit?

As far as issue #1, well basically I just rushed into a frenzy of inactivity, which included the inability to make any decisions. My first thought was to switch the menu to burgers. Kind of standard fare, right? That's why I didn't want to do it. But I slowly started to warm to it, thinking I could make pretty massive examples of burgers, like R.F. O'Sullivan style. Massive meat bombs. Get all the right fixin's. And maybe I could cook up a little bacon beforehand for bacon cheeseburgers. OK, sounds good. But then some potential guests suggested that they had Omaha Steak burgers and could contribute.

Well, damn, if someone else wants to bring some emat, I can't say no. So now what?

Waiting until Sunday morning (the day of the now termed Dinner Party) I decided to go with an old favorite. Sure, I'd only made it once before, but people seemed to dig it. Stuffed chicken. Here's the deal. Get some chicken breasts, the thicker the better. Cut them open, and stuff them full of peppers, onions, and bacon. Insert a couple of toothpicks to help keep them shut and throw them on the grill. When cooked, sprinkle a little cheese on top. Once melted, remove and eat. Mmmm.

I complimented this with a macaroni and cheese dish I'd been wanting to try since I saw it prepared on BBQ Univeristy with Steven Raichlen. (Who, if you've never seen the show, reminds me a lot of Bob Ross, except instead of making paintings, makes BBQ.) The mac n' cheese calls for not just macaroni and cheese (cheddar), but also corn, onions, garlic (which I forgot), red and yellow peppers, as well as some other ingredients that I didn't have. I'm always a little apprehensive about making my friends guinea pigs when I try out something new---especially when that something new calls for boiling milk until it thickens into a sauce; for some reason I always feel that if you do that wrong, the milke might turn poisonous or something; don't ask me why, I don't know---but it turned out quite well.

Then, my roommate made a nice spinach, tomato, and mozzarella salad to go along with it and we were pretty much ready to roll.

Also included in the eating was some Italian bread and butter, Matt brought over some burgers, Maria brought some banging chocolate chip cookies, and some Italian cookies/desserts my roommmate and her boyfriend picked up at Bob's.

So we were not wanting for food.

As for issue number 2, some of the people that said they would try to make it, ended up not being able to. No biggie, that always happens. Even still, we managed to shoehorn 10 people into the apartment without much problem.

All in all, I judge it a rousing success.

And the best part?....leftovers.