A Catered Farewell

In late August, a good friend of mine got some great news: she got an assignment to Europe! Naturally, I reacted in two ways: first, I gave squeals of congratulations; and, second, I asked when we were hosting her farewell party. When she picked the one weekend in mid-September that I had already booked twice with other friends, I did ask her to reconsider but I didn’t lose my cool. I had recently pulled off a dinner party in 48-hours, so I knew it was very possible to pull off a decent dinner party in two weeks. I did begin to panic when her list for the Evite went over 15 guests, and she was still inviting more via text message. However, I calmed down a bit when she decided to have the event at her house and she requested an Italian menu. I could do an Italian menu in my sleep – and I probably did.

The Planning and Preparation

In typical fashion, I didn’t really start planning for the Saturday night party until Tuesday night after work. At that point, my friend was estimating that seven people would be attending in addition to the Evite invitees, which gave me a grand total of 25 people. She also informed me that one guest was gluten free and another guest was vegan. I tried to be gracious and say that it would be no problem to accommodate the dietary restrictions; however, inside I was starting to panic because that meant an additional two special dishes to prepare. I gave it some thought and came up with a reasonable menu.

Tuesday night I also had enough energy to prepare the aperitif. Since I was going with an Italian theme, I decided that I would mix a bottle of Negroni. Typically, the Negroni is an equinox cocktail made of gin, Campari, and sweet red vermouth. However, after I little research into the topic, I found a recommendation for mixing the Negroni with 1 ounce gin, ¾ ounce Campari, and ¾ ounce sweet red vermouth. Since I like gin and don’t like Campari, I decided to mix my batch according to the recipe that was lighter on the Campari. After bottling the batch, I put that along with the bottles of gin, Campari, and sweet red vermouth in a reusable shopping bag and set it near the stairs to come with me on Saturday evening.

Wednesday night after work I had just enough time to work on the grocery list. Fortunately, the recipes came from just three sources: my family cookbook, the 2016 Best of ARC addendum, and a recent digital advance reader copy cookbook from NetGalley. So I was able to come up with the grocery list fairly quickly without a lot of searching. And then I did something I never have done before: I emailed my good friend a list of groceries and tasks that she would be responsible for. There were only eight things on the list, including drinks, bread, and plates, but that did a lot to cut down what I had to bring with me to her house. I also texted her to confirm her count of guests, because the Evite was only showing a few people. She replied that there would be 15 to 18 people attending, including the vegan and the gluten free individuals. All I asked was to be informed if the guest list started to tip toward the 18 to 20 people range.

Thursday night after work was my big night: grocery shopping AND cleaning out the refrigerator. I’m not sure which was more time consuming. Both kind of blurred together in my mind because I went straight from work to the grocery store and then attacked the refrigerator as soon as I came home because there wasn’t enough space for the new food. It kind of felt like cleaning out the horde cabinet because there was so much old stuff in plastic containers lurking in the back of the refrigerator that I just threw it all out without even trying to salvage the containers. (I knew what most of it was, I’m just not going to admit how old it was!) Fortunately, after I was done, I had cleared about one and a half shelves worth of space for the new food to all fit into the refrigerator.

The Cooking

The first thing I did in the kitchen on Friday night was start a pot of water for the gluten free pasta for the baked ziti. I figured that I could save about twenty minutes time waiting for a second pot of water to boil by cooking the gluten free pasta first, removing that with my Chinese spider instead of draining it through a colander, and then reusing the still very hot water (if not boiling) water to cook the noodles for the lasagna. While the ziti was cooking, I coated the bottom of a disposable foil tray with tomato sauce and got out the pound of mozzarella and small container of ricotta. After 12 minutes, I used the Chinese spider to remove the ziti straight from the boiling water into the prepared foil pan. Once the pan was approximately half full, I covered the pasta in sauce, half the mozzarella cheese, and about half the container of ricotta. Then I layered on the rest of the ziti, finished the jar of sauce, the remaining half pound of mozzarella, and the container of ricotta. I covered the fully assembled pan with aluminum foil and labeled it “Gluten Free Baked Ziti, Bake @ 350F for 20 Minutes.” There was no way I could forget what it was or how to prepare it. And if I got busy with something else, my good friend could take matters into her own hands.

While I was assembling the tray of baked ziti, I was also cooking the noodles for the lasagna. Just as I was stepping back from having fit the tray of ziti onto the bottom shelf of refrigerator, the timer for the lasagna noodles went off. I drained those into a colander in the sink, and let them sit there to cool while I gathered the jar of sauce, the pound of mozzarella, the pound of ricotta, and the jar of ground nutmeg (our secret family ingredient!) I lightly coated the bottom of another disposable foil tray with tomato sauce, and layered the hot noodles lengthwise to cover the bottom and overlap the short edge of the tray. Then I dolloped and spread half the container of ricotta over the base layer of noodles and generously dusted with nutmeg. Of course, only after I laid the next layer of noodles on top of the ricotta did I realize that I forgot the mozzarella in the bottom layer. So I picked up the layer of noodles, spread about six ounces of mozzarella over the nutmeg laced ricotta, and relaid the noodles. Then I covered the noodles with sauce, dolloped and spread the remainder of the container of ricotta over the noodles and covered that with about six ounces of mozzarella. Finally, I laid one last layer of lasagna noodles, smothered that with the remainder of the jar of sauce, and topped with the remainder of the mozzarella. Like the ziti, I covered the fully assembled pan with aluminum foil and properly labeled it with name, time, and temperature, so that there would be no confusion. Then I stashed that on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, right on top of the tray of gluten free baked ziti.

By 930pm I was exhausted, so I decided to take a short nap until 1130pm and pick up in the kitchen at that time. However, I didn’t wake up until 230am. And I didn’t start back in the kitchen until 3am. Once I made coffee and turned on the oven, I was ready to start the sauce.

I always use my father’s recipe to make homemade sauce, which he most likely learned from my grandmother or great-grandmother. I started the same way that I always do – sautéing an entire head’s worth of whole garlic cloves in olive oil. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to check the horde cabinet to see if I still had the secret ingredient in stock; I had none left, and decided to proceed without it rather than check whether the supermarket nearest me was open at 3am. Skipping the secret ingredient, I proceeded to the next step: opening the cans of San Marzano tomatoes and squeezing them into the pot. Because my good friend projected that there would be 15 to 18 people in attendance, I opted for four cans of tomatoes to hopefully make enough sauce. Once all the tomatoes were squeezed into the pot and all the cans were rinsed and recycled, I added the requisite palmful of sugar and palmful of salt. Then I lowered the heat and set my phone timer for two hours.

The next endeavor was to bake the meat for the sauce. I turned the oven to 350F, and then started with the meatballs because those were much messier than the chicken. Again, because of the large number of guests, I started with two packages of meatball mix – a store ground combination of beef, pork, and veal – as well as two eggs and two gluten free ciabatta rolls, which I tore into tiny pieces. I seasoned that mess with parmesan cheese, garlic powder, and parsley paste. Then I mixed it all together with my hands, formed it into small to medium sized meatballs, and splat the meatballs onto an aluminum foil lined cookie sheet. Once the meat mixture was used up, I put the two cookie sheets into the oven and set the timer for 20 minutes.

While the meatballs were in the oven, I set to preparing the chicken thighs. Not that there was much work required to prepare them. All I had to do was spray my largest clean glass pyrex baking dish with olive oil, pull the skins off the chicken thighs, and arrange the skinless thighs in the oiled pan. So once the meatballs came out, that pan went in for 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the chicken was not at safe temperature when the timer rang, so I put it back in for another ten minutes. At that point, the chicken was registering above the safe temperature of 165F, so it was good to be pulled out of the oven and set aside.

While the chicken was in the oven, I set to preparing the vegetables and the sausages for Sheet Pan Sausage and Peppers from Dinner Plan, a digital advance reader cookbook that I had through NetGalley. I usually pan fry my sausages and peppers, but this time I didn’t want to take up a burner because I still had to make the camponata for the vegan guest. So I decided to try the new recipe, which was extremely similar to my usual recipe. I cut the peppers and onions into long thin strips and tossed them with olive oil on an aluminum foil lined cookie sheet. Then I spread out that mixture evenly on the cookie sheet and carefully arranged the three packages of sausages on top of the vegetables. Just before I was about to put the sheet into the oven, I realized that I had forgotten the cherry tomatoes required by the recipe. So I dumped those right on top of all the sausages and then arranged them into the spaces between the sausages. That went into the 350F oven for 20 minutes on one side , before flipping and baking another 20 minutes on the other side. Once the sausages reached a safe internal temperature, I removed them into a disposable foil pan, dumped the cooked vegetables on top of the sausages, covered the pan with aluminum foil, and labeled it with name and reheating instructions. After it had cooled down enough to handle, I stashed it in the middle shelf of the refrigerator because it was too heavy to set on top of the two pasta trays without toppling them over.

By the time I was finished putting away the sausage and peppers in the refrigerator, it was time to add the meatballs and the chicken to the simmering pot of sauce. All of the chicken thighs fit, but only about three-quarters of the meatballs fit. So I packaged the remaining meatballs in a large disposable plastic container with some sauce and put that in the refrigerator to bring to the party. After all the meat was incorporated into the sauce, I reset the timer for another hour and set about preparing the two vegan dishes.

By this time, I was tired again. My kitchen was hot; at one point, the thermometer had reached 90F where I was standing. But instead of lying back down on the couch, I forged ahead with the eggplant camponata. I love eggplant camponata, and really the hardest part about making it is peeling the eggplant and cubing all the vegetables. I usually peel and cube the eggplant first, and then reserve that in a bowl while I am cubing the peppers and onion. I sautéed the onion with minced garlic from a jar because I was too tired to deal with peeling and mincing fresh garlic. Once the onion and garlic were soft and translucent, then I added the eggplant, bell pepper, and mushroom and sautéed that until the eggplant was soft and almost falling apart. Then I added the tomato paste and rinsed out the can with some white wine from the refrigerator. Of course, when there was just a finger’s width of wine left in the bottle, I gave some serious consideration to finishing it off. However, I did the responsible thing, and I added it to the sauté pan. And then I almost forgot the oregano, but managed to remember to toss that in at the last minute as well. While the mélange was simmering, I chopped up the can of olives and added those to the pan as well. After approximately 20 minutes of simmering and stirring, I declared victory on the vegan dish. I shoveled it into a large disposable plastic container and set it on top of the container of meatballs in the refrigerator.

Once I finished the eggplant camponata, there was no avoiding the task that I truly dreaded – the eggplant involtini. I had made this once last spring while I was recipe testing a vegan cookbook for NetGalley and, although it was a really good recipe, it was a real pain to make. The prep for the recipe starts out by requiring two eggplants to be sliced lengthwise into one centimeter thick slices. That is tricky because the eggplant don’t want to sit still on the cutting board and aren’t necessarily the easiest vegetable to saw through. My first two slices were total losses, but they had flattened that eggplant enough to make it stable on the cutting board so that the rest of the slices were beautiful. The second eggplant went a bit easier, but there was still a little bit of loss. These eggplant slices are laid out on an aluminum foil lined cookie sheet and baked for ten minutes on each side. While the eggplant was cooking, I had to make the gooey filling. The recipe said to start by grinding six tablespoons of slivered almonds, but since I had a bag of almond flour with just about six tablespoons left in it, I used the almond flour instead. To the almond flour, I added seven ounces of tofu and blended until smooth. After I dumped that into a mixing bowl, I looked at the remaining seven ounces of tofu and wondered what I was going to do with the leftovers. Since I couldn’t think of anything, I added that to the food processor, blended it until smooth, and stirred that into the bowl with the tofu-almond flour mix. Next, I sautéed five or six tablespoons of minced garlic from a jar with twelve ounces of fresh baby spinach until the spinach was wilted. That went into the food processor – with the liquid – blended until smooth, and then stirred into the tofu mixture in the bowl with a little lemon juice. By this time, the eggplant slices had cooled enough to handle. I prepared another disposable aluminum foil tray with tomato sauce spread across the bottom, and proceeded to assemble the involtini. To do that, I laid an eggplant slice flat in one hand, dolloped scooped two spoons of the filling onto the eggplant slice, and smeared it all over the eggplant slice. Then I gently rolled up the eggplant slice and placed it seam side down in the tray. It was a pretty messy and time consuming processing, but eventually I had all the involtini nestled into the tray. I topped the tray with the remainder of the jar of sauce, sealed the tray with aluminum foil, and labeled it with the contents and baking instructions. Fortunately, it was light enough to set on top of the stack of pasta trays in the refrigerator without causing them to tumble over!

By 830am, I was finished in the kitchen. Just enough time to have a cup of coffee and load some of the mess into the dishwasher before the tag sale crew showed up.

The Day of the Party

Around 9am that morning, another good friend and her crew showed up at my door for the townwide tag sale. And we were off, following brightly colored paper signs to yard sales throughout the town. At our second stop – $10 All You Can Carry – we were given an address list that described what was at each tag sale, so we could be slightly discriminating about which locations we stopped at. It was super fun!

At about 3pm, I returned to my house and started packing the car. It turned out not to be too challenging to move all the food to my good friend’s house. I had the shopping bag of liquor, which went into the trunk of the car. Then I had the four foil trays of food. I carried those out two at a time and arranged them on the back seat inside a bright blue reusable Ikea shopping bag. On the floor of the front seat, I arranged another reusable shopping bag in which I fit the red pot of sauce and the two plastic containers. I took the back road to the large liquor store to pick up a bottle of the special Meletti Sambuca and Peel Limoncello, and from there I went to the orchard store to buy giant locally grown beefsteak tomatoes and several dozen locally made ravioli. By 430pm, I was on my way up to my good friend’s house to start prepping the food in time for the guests’ arrival at 6pm.

Once we got all the food into my good friend’s house, the setup was super easy. The bottle of Negroni went right on the bar cart with the red wine. The sauce and the water for the ravioli immediately went onto the stove. Three of the four aluminum foil trays went into the oven at the same temperature for about 20 to 30 minutes to bake, and then could be kept warm at 200F for up to an hour. I recommended delaying putting those in until all the guests had arrived (people aren’t usually ready to eat as soon as they arrive), but my good friend wanted them to go in immediately. The fourth tray was the vegan dish, which went in at a slightly higher temperature, but that could go in later because the vegan guest was arriving closer to 7pm than the stated 6pm start. In accordance with the list that I had sent her, my friend had made an Italian chopped salad following the recipe I had sent her from my advance reader copy cookbook. She had also bought mozzarella cheese to make caprese salad with the beefsteak tomatoes that I had brought from the orchard. So the only thing for me really to do was to stir the sauce as it warmed on the stove, and to boil the ravioli when the guests were ready to eat.

The Verdict

In general, the food was very received by both my good friend and her guests. There turned out to be a second gluten free individual who didn’t tell anyone about her restriction, so she was pleasantly surprised that I had used gluten free ciabatta rolls in the meatballs and gluten free pasta in the baked ziti. The vegan was delighted by both the eggplant involtini and the camponata, and even asked for the recipe for the involtini. My good friend pressed leftovers on everyone who would take them, since she would be leaving in a few weeks. And because I had taken the half hour between cooking and going out to the tag sales to clean the kitchen, I didn’t come home to a complete disaster area.