Food, Glorious Food!

The New York Times says that dinner parties are dead. The Tampa Bay Times says, not really. From my perspective, I'd say that dinner parties are alive and thriving. We have always given dinner parties, but not the Manhattan kind where everything is exquisite. What we do is invite folks, mostly close to the last minute. "Hey, we have some great fish, come on over!" Or, more formally, a week or two in advance. At the ranch where we mostly live, we often invite local people to round out the weekend guests we frequently have. Our local friends usually bring eggs from their own chickens, or whatever interesting produce they have. We send them home with our garden produce, maybe some good books or puzzles. More often than not we have many dogs flopping around in the dining room and kids taking their places at the table. My husband who does all the cooking takes into consideration all the dietary needs (gluten free, vegan, vegetarian etc.) and comes up with wonderful menus everyone likes. The vegetables and salad come from our garden out back. I set the farm style table with colorful and casual stuff (Martha Stewart would be proud), and my eight year old grandson places and lights the candles. I am not concerned with how people dress! Just be clean, no bare torsos, no ball caps inside. The conversation will be great. And the food, the glorious food is stellar! Some of our friends are truly great cooks, and I think that it invigorates my husband to do the little extra when they come. Of course, in these dinner parties, we all eat the same things. Sometimes people who are staying in the guest house contribute dessert or something else. What truly interests me is that we all have to eat and we must eat the stuff we grow and cook from scratch. We must realize that eating is a social thing that is fun to do together. In doing this we'll all be slim and fit (even after scraping the last bits out of the lemon souffle pan!) Dinner parties give me courage to set forth again and again in this community where I labor so hard at growing a garden for all and find it uphill work where I daily encounter people who never cook from scratch, never have the wonderful experience of eating good food together and consume calories mostly from fast food and the Dollar General.