February
Provençal Birthday
This month’s dinner party is coming at the end of a rough week. You know “that week.” It’s the middle of February, everyone has the same shitty cold, which in my case is also resulting in daily nose bleeds. I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun. Work feels really busy for the first time since the holidays. Spirits are low. An argument could even be made that this was a bad week for me to choose to do this. But it had to be this week, because this week we are celebrating the birthday of my best friend of nearly a decade. The woman who not only made me an aunt, but also was enthusiastically receiving text updates about my haircut while going into labor.
This month we are toasting a flask smuggling, shit talking, sidewalk law vigilante, who was almost definitely into natty wine before you were. One thing Beth and I have in common is that we love hosting people for dinner (another is a taste for statement outerwear)
Beth is my girl for life and this is far from the first or last birthday dinner I will make for her, but honestly guys, this is gonna be a good one. The vision was a cozy French style country dinner. Compiling a French menu that isn’t pants-shittingly dairy based can be a little tricky, but not impossible. I’m reaching for a lot of veggies and carbs, and I am super happy with how it’s coming together.
The Menu:
Roasted Chicken with thyme, garlic and lemon
Ratatouille
Gougères
Green Salad with hazelnuts and radishes
Birthday Cake with lavender, vanilla and lemon Curd
Let’s break it down:
Chicken
What I made is basically Ina Garten’s “engagement chicken,” the chicken recipe that she famously claims is so good that if you make it for your man, he will propose to you. I love the notion of a man being so hypnotized by chicken that he feels a need to become bound for life to the source of that chicken. These chicken guzzling husbands do have a point though, the recipe is great. This whole bird stuffed with garlic, thyme, and lemon, then baked on a bed of onions, which cook in the juices, then lend themselves to a perfect gravy. I’m making two chickens because I’m feeding nine people. Another idea is to double the recipe just as I did, have one chicken for dinner, then affix the other one to the end of a fishing line, dangle it over an overpass and see if you can get a husband to chomp onto it.
Ratatouille
This classique French comfort dish is pure serotonin. Just sweet happy veggies lined up in little circles, with a nice herby tomato sauce holding them together. While the sauce is cooking, I slice roma tomatoes, eggplant and zucchini, then pour the sauce into a round baking dish and line up the veggies in nice circles. I make the ratatouille early in the day, then I'll just pop it in the oven to reheat before dinner.
Gougères
For those unacquainted, gougères are little cheesy pastry puffs, made from pate a choux, which is the same dough that is used to make eclairs. If you are choux-curious but a little intimidated, gougères are a great place to start. They use two parts choux dough to one part cheese, and are therefore a lot more forgiving if your choux base isn’t perfect. Mix in your shredded cheese, then season with salt, pepper, cayenne and mustard. Mine came out a lil ugly because I tried to bake them in the same oven as the chicken, which, it turns out, was too hot. But they still taste incredible. Case in point: gougères are forgiving.
Salad
In the days leading up to this party, I recalled a hazelnut vinaigrette from a French restaurant that I worked at years ago. I didn’t have it in my notes, so I started texting other chefs that I worked with there to see if I could get my grubby little hands on it. I had my girls Aggie and Amanda digging through closets, looking for old notebooks before it finally turned up. Hazelnut oil, EVOO, sherry vin, shallot, honey, salt and pepper, garlic, and thyme. It’s as good as I remembered. So let’s toss it with some mixed greens and candied hazelnuts. To candy the hazelnuts, bring some sugar and water to a boil in a frying pan. Once the bubbles are starting to look a little bigger and are bubblin’ a little slower, toss in your nuts. Keep tossing them around until they are nice and golden brown, then sprinkle in salt and a little pat of butter. Spread onto parchment or a silicone sheet to cool. Add some shaved radishes, and our salad is complete. Voila, salade de noisettes!!
Cake
It’s very European to syrup your cakes. Just a 1:1 simple syrup, flavored as you like, and drizzled over your cake layers before you assemble. I infused my syrup with dried lavender in the spirit of proviençal France. Three layers of white cake with lavender syrup, lemon curd between layers, and vanilla buttercream. Using a star shaped piping tip, I pipe little lavender colored hearts all around the cake. At this point, people will be getting here any minute and my hair is still wet. Fastest cake build of my damn life!
(In a future month, I promise I will do a more in-depth birthday cake how-to, but like I said, this month’s dinner was slapped together despite a cold that was kicking my ass. I did not remember to take cake pics.)
We are stirring up White Negronis while people start to arrive. I want to do a specifically French cocktail that isn’t Champagne based, since I figure people will bring wine. A white negroni is gin, Suze, and Lillet Blanc. Boozy, bitter and bright. Sarah puts on this playlist. I am still scurrying to finish setting the table while the baby distracts everyone by enthusiastically blowing raspberries. Hardly the last time my niece and I will be in cahoots, I’m sure.
Around the dinner table we toast to Beth, debate the merits of The Iron Giant vs. The Brave Little Toaster, and eventually get into Drag Race. I’m happy to discover that I am hosting a gaggle of fellow Plane Jane apologists.
As we cut the cake and pour another round of white negronis, the idea of putting on a movie is floated, then forgotten. Everyone has been cramped up, sick and cranky and it feels nice to just sit at the table and talk shit.
The next night, I get home late from work with leftover chicken on the mind. I slice open a piece of baguette, extract a head of roasted garlic from the nest of thyme in the cavity of the bird, and spread it on one side of the bread, then pile on chicken, and lay on a piece of pepper jack cheese. I pop the whole thing in the toaster oven while I mix up a little hot sauce mayo. Once the sandwich is toasty, I spread my mayo on the other piece of baguette, stuff with arugula and pickled onion, and slice on a diagonal (sorry to be controversial!) I toss together a salad with my leftover hazelnut vinaigrette and pour a little bit of that Lillet Blanc over the rocks, and boom! I’m having the time of my damn life with this little dinner for one.
Something Else I Ate This Month
Last year, our superbowl party theme was “coastal elite.” We had fresh oysters and french fries, with champagne and martinis.
This year we didn’t get it together to host a party and instead bought tickets to see Passages at Suns Cinema. A small but buzzy film about a bisexual villain biking around Paris, romantically terrorizing a girl and a gay guy. The crowd that came out to see Passages at an indie theater/cocktail bar DURING THE SUPERBOWL was giving off, as you can imagine, a very specifically alt vibe. So a couple hours before the movie when we slipped into Martha Dear for some pizza, we were immediately able to identify that everyone else in there was about to join us for the movie. This is not me trying to be all [insert hack joke about bisexual haircuts.] I’m saying this with love. I have a bisexual haircut! These are my people! I’m just saying it was undeniable that we were all going to the same place.
As we slid into our little two top amidst some of DC’s most dedicated alt personalities, we agreed that the prefect way to get pumped for some pizza was a caesar salad. Our server “warned” us that there would be anchovies on top, to which we said hell yeah brother, bring it on. From there we went into meatballs, then two pizzas. It was a lot of food, and none of the other alt moviegoers seemed to bring leftovers into Passages, but whatever! I work long chef hours, so having a few slices of pizza in the fridge tomorrow is worth lugging the box around for the night.
Thank You!
Thank you for reading my little newsletter! I have some big life changes coming up that will result in a lot more time for “content,” if you will. So let me know what else you would like to hear from this newsletter, and as always, if you enjoyed it, please share! See you next month!