Had some guests over last night where I wanted to honor the occasion.
When I set about doing that kind of dinner, I have several somewhat competing priorities:
The food should be visually impressive.
The food should taste distinctive, e.g., that most of the guests will not routinely have had what I’m serving.
If my guests have any food issues or strong preferences, the food should give them no concerns and should satisfy their tastes.
It should be possible to stagger out the preparation starting the evening before service and nothing should require a lot of attention at the last minute—I don’t want to be glued to the stovetop after my guests arrive.
It should be relatively foolproof—I don’t want to struggle with something where it’s going to be hard to be sure that roasting meat is neither undone or dried out. (E.g., the turkey problem on Thanksgiving.)
I should know (mostly) what I’m getting, so dishes I’ve made before or dishes that are very familiar to me in their composition and flavor.
I should be able to fit everything in the refrigerator after I come back from the market. I should also be able to cook everything in our relatively simple oven and stovetop and with my pots and pans, e.g., there’s a cap on the number of people I can make food for in this kitchen and house and I have to be mindful of what that is.
I should be able to stage out the preparation in a methodical way, avoiding any situations where I’ve got two things going that both require urgent attention at the same time.
Keeping all of that in mind, the next thinking I do is along these lines:
What’s the main dish? For this particular meal, I decided on the Thai baby back ribs I made not too long ago from the New York Times Cooking app. One of the simplest recipes I can think of but full of flavor.
Having settled on a main dish because I’m confident in it—I know it tastes good, I’ve made it before, I know exactly how involved it is—I now have to make next choice: am I going to stay with the cuisine that dish comes from, or am I going to mix-and-match? I decide I’m going to stay fully Thai-inspired, so now what? I generally want some kind of rice or noodles, I want a salad, and maybe I want something more like a curry or a soup.
I end up going with pineapple-fried rice and a green papaya salad. I consult a couple of cookbooks along with the NYT app to settle on some approaches, but I’ll wing both dishes to some extent. Not for the first time, I’m kind of put off by my two Thai-centered cookbooks—I should do a column centered on them soon, both of them have issues.
I decide to make a yellow coconut curry with shrimp and shiitake mushrooms and to use some frozen lobster stock I have to give it an even richer taste.
I figure I’ll make some simple corn on the cob with a spice rub.
Dessert is just going to be a good cheesecake bought from the store.
So how did it go?
I decided to quickly make some of Ivan Orkin’s little “pizzas” for an appetizer. About a fifteen minute assembly, easy, and they really impress people—I can’t recommend them enough.
The ribs went really well—I did an initial hour cook on them at low heat and then a last-minute broil (it was too wet out for the grill).
I underdressed the papaya salad but it was still a good mix. I think I was starting to feel like there was too much of a Red Boat flavor in everything, so I should have made a more Japanese-style dressing and put more of it on the salad. But it definitely looked good. The rice came out really well—I adapted Eric Kim’s recipe from the NYT but left out the chicken and added a few vegetables.
The curry was great—that was more or less just me doing it myself, as I didn’t find a recipe template that I liked very much. Great strong pungent odor to it.
I kind of screwed up the corn just because I boiled it a bit beforehand and it made it a kind of limp tasting thing; I didn’t broil it enough to get them really hot and then I forgot the lime wedges that makes the spice rub work—it was the last thing on the table and everybody had already started digging in. Basically I think it was one too many dishes and not really necessary.