A Low-Key Meal for Friends

A show-stopping recipe you can build a dinner party around. (Just don't call it a dinner party.)

A few days after we moved into our new apartment last September, I circled a Saturday in December on the calendar, then announced to my husband, “We’re having a holiday party this year.” Manhattan was new and exciting and everything felt like vacation, but also…I was eager to have friends and family come over so we could get to the business of making new memories, of warming up the space. And a big old housewarming party, if I was to believe its name, seemed to be exactly the way to get there fast.

Well, that day in December came and went. We never had a big party. We never had a small party, or even really a dinner party, a term, which, to me will always connote pressed linens and advance planning. These days, it’s more like…we just cook for people. We cook for them the way we would if it was a weeknight and our kids were still around the table: casually, un-ambitiously, aiming to comfort not impress — essentially family dinner but with “family” now expanding to include friends, neighbors, kids, or anyone swinging through town. And not that I was ever the type of host to be spooning caviar on top of individual blinis, but this less-fussy approach has really perpetuated the Love Story in Dinner A Love Story — it’s easy to keep inviting people over when it’s this easy to cook for them.

I will say, however, that I have discovered an important new entertaining strategy that has made a huge difference…