First of all……Mess Hall recently hit 10K subscribers! Very exciting. And hello to everyone who subscribed after this post got passed around last week.
Paid subscriptions to Mess Hall are currently 25% off! That’s just $30 for a year of exclusive recipes, bonus blogs, commenting, etc. Also, as mentioned in September, half of all Mess Hall proceeds before the end of the year will be split between The Sameer Project and The Trevor Project. So $13 of your subscription gets split between these orgs, and $13 goes to your friendly neighborhood food blogger, and like $4 goes to Substack. Not bad!!
This year I have decided to force myself into holiday mode. I stayed in New York for Thanksgiving, in part because Thanksgiving sucks and in part because the best weekend of the year is those three quiet days after the holiday. That Friday, I dragged myself out of the house to see the Ruth Asawa exhibit at MoMA1 and get a 90 minute massage—one of the best ways you can spend an afternoon in the city. Saturday I finally made it to Rolo’s with Cale and Kyle, and was gobsmacked by how good it was. I’ll be writing about their martini shortly.
I also got a tree for the first time in maybe three years. It has been a rough year, and I refuse to wallow through December; a tree helps. FYI, the official Bull Family tree-trimming soundtrack is The Roches’ “We Three Kings.”
One thing I love about holiday mode is that you get to act like you’ve reinvented the wheel. Jackson and I made hot chocolate while trimming the tree and felt like we’d invented hot chocolate. I bought a pack of 100 mini candy canes at Whole Foods and felt like a genius! It snowed yesterday morning and I felt like a baby, my eyes freshly open to the world!!
Still on the holiday to-do list: Make Sohla’s potato chip moon pies (Sohla forever!!!). Go ice skating with Clio + Diane. Have a martini at Keens with my boyfriend. Watch Carol and Metropolitan. Outing to Yunnan Flavor Garden, though that’s more of a Jan 1/ Jan 2 type activity. Sip from Cale and Kyle’s ice luge. Explain the plot of Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree to at least three more people. Read “In Memoriam [Ring out, wild bells]” at Christmas dinner again (h/t Shawna Kay). Eat my mother’s brownies and my father’s (new hobby alert!!!) apple pie. Make soup from the matzah mix that Emily gave me :)
The best food gift. My older sibling’s AMAZING CANDLES2. Julia Fernandez’s photo booth house frames don’t ship til February but an IOU for one of those would make a certain type of person very happy. Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life — the perfect not-cookbook for food people. A gift certificate for knife sharpening (I’ve been dropping hints!!!). HEATED RIVALRY TUNA MELT HAT. Tea made from Alder leaves (h/t Max). Marissa Zappas discovery set for the Elegant Woman in your life! I just texted my mom to request an Amish broom3.
[What I bought for MYSELF is this Noguchi pendant—only 1 more left in stock!!]
Since moving to my apartment in 2018, I have thrown an annual Christmas party. (Only once has it taken place outside my apartment, which was a small disaster—the bar was too loud and too crowded; some people decamped to a second bar; luckily, I had an amazing attitude about it!!) The party has grown with me through my thirties; it is now slightly less chaotic than it once was.
Yesterday I saw a reel, which I will not link, from an influencer talking about party hosting tips as a way to promote a recent brand event. This brand event probably cost…..well over ten thousand dollars? She recommended creating a mood board, and giving a gift to each of your 20+ plus guests. Sorry to this beautiful & talented woman but I get so peeved when people make “content” implying that this sort of party is attainable. At least Martha knew she was inaccessible and owned it! I much prefer Lobster for 200 to nap dress faux-relatability.
That said, over the years I have learned a few things about throwing a party, and this was the year that I felt like I was really putting them into practice. Idk if I come off as a breezy, sweatless host but I promise you I am not. My relationship to entertaining verges on masochism; it drives me nuts and brings me joy in equal measure. Anyways: My primary goal was to avoid feeling frazzled an hour before the party began. For the first time, I succeeded. So I have recently decided on a big party rule: You should not do any actual cooking after 12 PM the day of your party.
I make a habit of throwing my party on a Friday. This way you tidy & recover on Saturday, then have Sunday to walk through the snow with your lover, blog, see the new Jafar Panahi movie, etc. The weekend beforehand, I made an elaborate To-Do google doc that separated my tasks out by day. I did not follow it exactly but it put me in the correct mindset, which is: do as much as you can ahead of time. Each day I tried to do at least one food/drink task and one cleaning task. By Thursday evening the apartment was basically clean. Friday I allowed myself two final elegant errands: buying a case of wine4 at Atlas and getting my legs waxed; the combo made me feel like a WOMAN on the TOWN! By 5 pm all the serving dishes were laid out5 and the ice was in the tub. By 7 I was chilling with my takeout, listening to the CMAT album and doing some very mild fussing.
Some other rules I have adopted: Roll up your rugs, let your guests wear a fucking shoe, and schedule the cleaners for Monday if at all possible; put the rugs back on Tuesday. A dip, a sweet, and a snacky snack (e.g. spiced nuts) are plenty. (A few years ago, I went store-bought and people kept complimenting the Wegmans onion dip.) Ruffles are the best party chip; Cape Cod is second. Spread the snacks & drinks throughout the apartment to avoid bottlenecks; I put cocktails in the bedroom. Batched 50/50 martinis always hit. NO DRINKS ON THE BED. The fridge is off limits, storage wise, as is the real glassware. (Chinet cups are fine, unless you have serious storage.) A playlist is important, but if your party is good people won’t really be able to hear it, so it’s the impulse that counts, at least until the afters. Nobody but me (+ Jack) are allowed to clean up, and that happens the next morning.6 If people want to get a little wild, you must encourage this; it’s December. A tree is enough décor; this year I dressed mine with my mini candy canes, and tucked the rest throughout the house as easter eggs. When no one was eating them, I started going up to people and saying did you know the candy canes are organic???7
Lindsey made these very beautiful and fun APEROL SPRITS ORANGE JELLO SLICES! The woman at the wine store who judged this idea is SHAKING!!!!!
Bobby made his now-famous Sugar Cookie Fingers (sry I’m naming them) — he swaps out the vanilla extract for almond. When I saw that he’d brought a batch I GASPED with joy.
I made the spiced nuts from Arabiyya, a Boursin-like dip from Ham El-Waylly’s forthcoming Hello, Home Cooking, and a double batch of Amy Thielen’s Sticky Date Olive Oil cake from Company.8 The cake was a big big hit, though people seemed even more excited about the sour cream whip it’s served with. (By request, I’ve PDF’ed the recipe below.)
Will brought leftover Buffalo Chicken Dip and it made me think that more people should bring leftovers to parties. We hate waste and love buffalo chicken!!!!
I also made some [redacted] cocktails from [redacted project I am working on], but the second-best thing I drank all night was this bottle of zippy fruity just-strange-enough red wine that Kyle brought.
Cake PDF below! A treat for the brave souls who made it all the way to the end. Pls tell me in the comments your strong feelings and rituals re: holiday parties I need to know if I’m insane or not xoxoxoxox
I generally think it’s corny to take pics of wall text but this really got me!
My fav scents are MAGIC BEARD, SOLSTICE SKY, TEA DANCE, LAVENDER MENACE, and SMOKED OUD
“You are a hoot! This is what you want? You got it!”
Since people also BYO we generally don’t go through a whole case, but I love it because a) I love a discount and b) then I’m left with a surplus of wine to enjoy or bring to other parties over the next few months.
Ideally this happens the night before, but it never does.
Another lesson I learned this year is that it’s a very good idea to pick yourself up some freezer bagels, breakfast sausage, and American cheese slices to pre-empt (and budget-proof) your own need for a sausage egg and cheese the next morning(s).
my other bit of the night was claiming that everyone who didn’t show up had been “added to the spreadsheet.” was I being serious?????? who knows
I have a bad habit of always making things I’ve never made before; luckily these all worked out :)
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.