Hey you,
Cooking a three-course meal in California, in the height of summer…is not for the faint of heart.
“You’re in way over your head.”
This was my partner’s response after I said we should make our own lemonade from scratch by squeezing six lemons in a juicer and adding the appropriate sugar measurements to it. I’m frantically cutting the heirloom tomatoes I bought at the farmers’ market at the weekend, and I admit I don’t need any more stress. Reluctantly, I allow him to buy store-bought lemonade and mix it with iced tea to make our new favourite summer drink: Arnold Palmer’s. I get on with making sure that the kitchen isn’t a total disaster. How did Julia Child do this?
The title of this post comes from the fact that when our friends in London find out that we hosted dinner here in Los Angeles, they’ll be pissed. For all the time we lived there, our closest guy friends begged us to let them come around for dinner and for some reason, we always opted to eat out with them instead.
There was always a sense of anxiousness about having guests in our home. Though I loved/love our apartment in London, if it had more than two people in it at one time, it would feel overcrowded. There was also something about our apartment in London that felt a bit of a placeholder; not everything was exactly the way we wanted it, and some things needed a bit of a renovation.
Looking back now, I think: get over it, boys, and host your friends! Life is worth living, and we have all got to stop waiting for the perfect time.
After three weeks in our new apartment in LA, we invited one of Jacob’s longtime friends over for dinner on our balcony. This was as much due to the fact that we have a gorgeous wraparound balcony that faces the sunset over the Hollywood Hills as it was to the fact that we had no indoor furniture yet. Our TV is very much still balancing on a suitcase, as we speak.
Truthfully, the reason for inviting him over was that we don’t have a lot of friends here yet. There is a special type of loneliness for a couple in their thirties who uproot their entire lives across the Atlantic to start from square one. And so, we wanted to show off our fancy new view to someone that we were, in fact, already friends with. And do you know, dear reader? Somewhere between the first drink being poured and all of us settling into one another’s company, a shift happened for me.
With our Arnold Palmers at the ready and a kitchen that was left in more chaos than my partner would like to admit, we served an heirloom tomato galette to start, a summer steak salad for main, and an orange olive oil cake to finish. If you are looking for a showstopper to arrive with at any BBQ/dinner party this summer, I’d save the cake recipe below. You’ll be the most popular person in the room.
Here’s the thing: I’ve grown sour towards “catching up” culture. Not for the original intent behind it, but because of what it has become. Somewhere along the way, “catching up” stopped meaning spending time together and started meaning finding an empty slot in our calendars. You want to talk about the male loneliness epidemic? This new ideal is part of the bigger problem. In the era of optimisation and maxxing every goddamn thing in our lives, I’ve started to notice that “fitting in friends” has become another exercise in trying to find space in our work diaries. As if it is not important.
As a self-proclaimed introvert, I bristle even at the mention of the phrase “let’s catch up sometime”. We have all used it, and I think we’ve all meant it in the moment. Unfortunately, many of us have, unintentionally, have maxxed self-isolating and become way too comfortable with it, all the while keeping friendships very much on the outside.
Whenever we do manage to ‘catch up’, it is usually a spot in the calendar - time blocked between errands, the gym or work meetings that we’ve managed to sandwich it between. We end up giving each other quick headlines about our lives, and any real connection or sense of deepening relationships is left for another time.
Why, you ask? Maybe we are in the late stages of capitalism, where all of us are just frantically trying to keep our heads above water, to keep running on the hamster wheel without falling off.
Recognising yourself yet?
What happened to just “hanging out”? Does anyone do that anymore- helping a friend fold their washing away, or watching a movie together without checking the time? Or am I just getting older?
I sometimes wonder whether we are still carrying the habits that we picked up in the pandemic years - too used to staying indoors and locking out the rest of the world. Now, when we have the opportunity to allow people back into our homes, I notice for myself how easy it is to stay behind closed doors, to keep things at a distance. When are we going to start inviting people back in again? To check in on our neighbours to see if they need any more milk, or hold the door open for someone just because it’s the polite thing to do, instead of screaming at each other online.
Hosting dinner, though stressful, can bring people into a room together. Something shifts in conversation when people are sharing a meal- it becomes gold dust. No one is rushing or competing for attention (unless you have some terrible dinner guests).
Quite extraordinarily, as someone who finds big crowds and busy spaces slightly overwhelming at times (why I’ve lived in major cities the past ten years, I’ll never know), hosting an intimate dinner for the three of us connected me to myself. To host is to hold a conversation open and notice what the table is really circling. It gives us all a chance to slow down, dial into what real people are talking about and be inquisitive without worrying about time or the next destination. And dear reader, I’ve missed doing that.
What’s more, unless you chargrill your dessert to the point of no return, your guests are either going to adore your cooking or lie through their teeth about it, so it’s a win/win for your ego (I should know).
I guess I’ve been noticing how easy it is to drift further away from real life at the moment, without really meaning to. AI and social media are quietly filling so much of our days without us noticing it happening. It has made me try to interrupt that a bit more- not reaching for my phone first thing in the morning, and instead actually saying good morning to my partner in real time. It sounds small, but it has already begun to change my days. We all have to choose something different, not because technology is going anywhere, but because we get to decide how we meet it. Quality time with people, as simple as it sounds, still feels like the way back to ourselves. It certainly has been for me, these past couple of weeks.
So if you’ve been thinking of hosting a movie night, a dinner party, or you just need someone to help fold your laundry, I think there is something worth paying attention to there. How simple it was to have our friend sitting on our balcony, sharing dinner. I think I’d like plenty more evenings like that.
I’ve included the three dishes we made below - not because they were complicated, but because they work perfectly together for a night, as I’ve discussed above.
This was the dish that set the tone for the evening - light, refreshing, slightly imperfect, just as all summer cooking should be.
Ingredients:
1 sheet of pastry dough
4 ripe, heirloom tomatoes, sliced
1/2 cup of spreadable garlic cheese
3 tablespoons of wholegrain Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper
Milk, to brush
1/ cup of everything bagel seasoning
3 green onions, sliced
1/3 cup of feta cheese
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 - 400F, depending on pastry dough instructions.
Slice the heirloom tomatoes and layer them onto a clean tea towel/paper towels.
Sprinkle them lightly with salt and cover with the rest of the tea towel, lightly dabbing the moisture from them and allowing them to sit for 10 - 15 minutes.
Roll out the pastry dough onto a parchment - lined baking sheet.
Leaving a 1 - 4 inch border around the edges, spread the cheese and whole grain Dijon mustard evenly over the dough.
Arrange tomato slices over the cheese, slightly overlapping them to create an even layer.
Season the tomatoes with salt and pepper, as desired.
Using a fork, prick the border of the pastry dough several times before brushing the edging with milk.
Sprinkle Everything Bagel seasoning around the edges.
Bake for 20 - 30 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and the tomatoes have softened and cooked through.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly.
Serve by sprinkling green onions and crumbled feta over the galette before slicing and serving warm.
PS. Do not miss salting and draining the tomatoes if you don’t want the galette to have a soggy bottom.
This was the dish that came and went without a hitch - eaten between conversations, rather than a ‘main course’.
Ingredients:
1 cucumber
2 cups of cherry tomatoes
2 avocados
2 lbs grass-fed sirloins
2 cups of coriander
Sunflower seeds for garnish
Light vinaigrette (olive oil, lemon juice, mustard)
Instructions:
Dice cucumber, tomatoes, avocados, and coriander, and add to a large salad bowl.
Sear sirloin steaks on each side for two minutes, on high heat.
Put in the oven for five minutes at 400 degrees, before letting them rest for five minutes.
Dice steak and add to the salad serving bowl.
Add dressing and sunflower seeds, and mix well.
This was the showstopper of the night and guaranteed to make people want seconds. Fairly simple to make, yet it’s the cake that will make your guests remember the evening.
Ingredients:
Dry
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
1 cup of granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp of salt
Zest of two oranges
Wet
3/4 extra virgin olive oil (make sure it’s a good one, and not bitter)
3 large eggs, room temperature
1/2 cup of milk, room temperature
1/4 cup of fresh orange juice
1 tsb of vanilla extract
Icing
1 cup of ricotta cheese
2 tbsp butter, room temperature
1/2 cup of powdered sugar
1 tbsp of orange juice
1 tbsp of orange zest
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350F.
Grease and line a round cake tin.
In a large bowl, rub orange zest into the granulated sugar with your fingers until fragrant.
Add remaining dry ingredients and whisk to combine.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the olive oil, eggs, milk, orange juice and vanilla until smooth.
Add wet ingredients to the dry mix until combined. Don’t overmix.
Pour into prepared cake tin and bake for 50 - 60 minutes. Keep an eye on this and do the toothpick trick in the centre of the cake. If it comes out clean, then it is ready. Overbaking dries out the cake, so be careful.
Cool in the tin for 15 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to allow the cake to cool completely.
Ice the cake as close as you can to serving it. Beat the ricotta, butter, powdered sugar, orange juice, and zest until smooth and fluffy. If the icing is too runny, put it in the fridge for five/ten minutes to firm up slightly.
Spread over the cooled cake.
Until next time,
Chris.
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