A Few Good Meals: Holiday Edition

party snacks, party rules, sohla's short ribs, etc

A brief scheduling note:

I’ll have some sort of year-in-review post for you next week, and then will be off for two weeks, back in January. Mess Hall needs a little vacation, and I hope you get one too.

If you’re looking for some bonus reading, I wrote about an excellent, playful, strange, delicious dinner party-slash-theater experience called BIG SANDWICH for my latest Gothamist column. A lot of fun to report and write.

And now for your regularly scheduled food blogging. Welcome back to A Few Good Meals, where I highlight the best things I’ve cooked/eaten in the last month or so. (Like maple syrup cotton candy or khao man gai or rice paper rolls.) Sometimes I will even review a restaurant! Today we’ve got a party recap (+ thoughts on “bites”), a cocktail hour snack for one, and a new way to make short ribs from THEE Sohla El-Waylly. These posts are for paid subscribers only. Join us :)

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Snacks for forty

I wrote last week that I have been in a deep cooking rut, but there have still been some bright spots over the past month or so. Last Friday I threw my semi-annual holiday party, an event I have now hosted five (?????) times in this apartment, and which I am finally getting the hang of. I love to have people over, but I am not a natural party planner. I am always ready fifteen minutes after the party is supposed to start; this year saw a very last-minute excursion to buy twelve bags of ice. I have a tiny kitchen and an innate impatience, which means I do not generally enjoy cooking the category of food people call “bites”. But I am insistent on a holiday party nonetheless, and this year finally felt like some general rules and preferences were coalescing.

I took Friday off to prepare the apartment, which had become overrun with stacks of books and ceramics and shipping supplies and weird piles of whatever. I always roll up the rugs, so that people can keep their shoes on; this year I remembered to put a trash can in every room. I also finally learned that there is NO NEED to hire a cleaner before the party, and you should instead hire a cleaner after the party; for some reason in years past I thought my friends would care about sundry dust collecting in my corners. (They do not.) I did wipe down the tub, which I would later be filling with ice, and then booze. I only bought screw-top wine; nobody wants to be bent over a claw foot tub hollering for a wine key.