Menu: Nibble: Charcuterie and Champagne
Appetizer: Bacon-wrapped Dates and Prosciutto and Basil-wrapped Melon - White Wine to Drink
Soup: Gazpacho (Recipe below.)
Salad: Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Vinaigrette - White Wine to Drink
Main: Coq au Vin with Mashed Potatoes and Bacon-braised Brussels Sprouts -Pinot Noir to Drink
Dessert: Lemon and Blueberry Layer Cake - Espresso or Cortado to Drink
Nightcap: Raspberry and Lemon Macarons and Tawny Port
Liz and I park on the street in front of the house. There is a sculpture in the front yard of an oversized rooster. I see Sarah glance at us through the window. “They’re here,” I imagine her saying to Frank, her husband.
Sarah sent us a working copy of the menu a week ago, then the finalized menu a couple of hours before we were set to arrive. If only I could be so organized. Sarah thrives on it. We worked together until she got sick with an autoimmune disorder last year and had to quit because she could hardly get out of bed. At work she was just as organized, putting together lengthy proposals, neatly filing away the necessary information on each page. I imagine she combatted her health issues in the same way, thoroughly and with an organized plan. She tells me later her diet makes all the difference—turns out she’s got Celiac Disease and can’t eat gluten. Her planned menu for us is a smorgasbord that sets out to prove how delicious a gluten-free meal can be.
Inside, the dining room table is already set with white china, a formal amount of silverware, a plethora of glasses for each of our beverage pairings. In the kitchen we meet Frank, with his dark beard and enviously small amount of body fat, which he’s earned from many hours on the bike. He used to be rated as a professional cyclist, he tells us.
Sarah offers us drinks, and Frank seems to know it’s his responsibility to make them. He pulls three tumblers from the kitchen cabinets and pours a dram of Dickel over ice into each one. When he hands me my whiskey, I see on the side is a green, painted bicycle. Cycling permeates the air in their house—its how they met; he worked at a cycling shop and she came in to get her bike worked on.
“Should we go into the other room?” Sarah asks. I assume she means where the table has been set, but when we get there, she guides me into their den, where she has prepared charcuterie to eat with our drinks. There are cheeses soft and hard, creamy and dry—all delicious. There is salami and prosciutto, pickles, olives, and she has roasted garlic cloves.
Just as the four of us take a seat, there is a knock at the front door. Sarah has invited their friends Trevor and his fiancé—also named Liz—to join us for dinner. They come bearing beer and wine and a card game called Superfight, made by the same company responsible for the ever-popular Cards Against Humanity. Frank pours a few glasses of champagne while Liz and I fork charcuterie onto our plates and Sarah goes back to the stove.
At the table, Sarah serves us appetizers of bacon-wrapped dates, immediately followed by prosciutto and basil-wrapped watermelon and cantaloupe. I’ve never had anything like the meat-wrapped melon and it’s everything I can do to not eat the entire platter. She serves us each a bowl of Spanish gazpacho—cold and spicy, refreshing and delicious.
I ate too much melon, I can feel it. I’m full and the salad hasn’t made it to the table yet. I wonder how everyone else at the table is doing, if they’ve eaten too much as well.
Over the salad there is a warm bacon vinaigrette and conversation about how each of the couples at the table met. Liz and Trevor met as strangers on a cruise, and they’ll soon be married on one. My Liz and I met as coworkers, and then we developed mutual affections for each other (I was completely enamored with her) until holding it in became too much to take and we had to tell each other how we felt (I told her how I felt) over Vietnamese food one day (she was startled/pissed) and we were thrilled we could finally move forward with our new lives together out in the open just as we’d always imagined (it took her a while to come around to the idea, but she finally did and I’m a real catch and she’s never going to leave me). Sarah and Frank were roommates for a year before they started dating. Even after they were dating, they kept their separate rooms.
“After dates would you walk her to her bedroom door?” I ask Frank.
“Pretty much.”
Hints of that roommate mentality still show in their interactions. There’s a roommate kind of mutual respect that clearly exists in the space between them. But there is also the support that comes from being more than roommates. It shows in the way Frank holds the dish so Sarah can put the Brussels sprouts in it. It shows in their smiles.
“This is the same coq au vin we had at our wedding,” Sarah says.
There’s a mountain of it on mashed potatoes on my plate. I was full two courses ago and am reaching a point of serious gluttony, but I think about tomorrow, when I’ll be hungry again and I know I’ll regret not eating everything on my plate now, and so I do. And then the lemon and blueberry layer cake shows up. When Sarah puts a piece in front of Liz, I think of asking for a small piece—a piece the size of which would cause my grandfather to refer to it as the son-in-law’s piece—but then Liz says something along the lines of “Good gawd. It’s so good.”
Frank offers espresso, everyone accepts. It goes perfectly with the cake. I have no idea where all this food is going, but I keep ingesting it. By the time we retire back to the den to play Superfight, I’m going into a food coma. I can feel my brain shutting down. We drink port wine and Sarah puts raspberry and lemon macarons in front of us and we eat and we eat and we eat and I’d be forced to fall asleep there on the couch, but either Frank or Sarah has let Barley the labradoodle out of his cage and he is now standing on my chest and licking my face briefly before honing in on Liz’s.
“Barley!” Sarah says, but Liz and I like it. We encourage him by petting his curly black coat and scratching under his chin.
“You have to take me home,” I tell Liz after a few more minutes. There’s still a plateful of uneaten macarons, but I convince myself I’ve done my share tonight. I’m so fat and happy. Frank assures me Barley can eat the macarons. Sarah assures me Barley will not be eating the macarons. Frank again assures me Barley will get a macaron. They bicker like a couple of roommates, who are in love.
Spanish Gazpacho Recipe, as emailed from Sarah:
4 large heirloom tomatoes
1 large cucumber, peeled and deseeded
4 cloves garlic
1 red bell pepper
1 green bell pepper
1 small red onion
1 jalapeno deseeded
1 4-inch section of baguette - cubed
1 Avocado
Process tomatoes, cucumber, garlic, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, onion, jalapeno and baguette together with a pinch of salt and fresh cracked pepper in food processor until very smooth (about 3-5 minutes). Depending on the size of your processor, you may have to divide the ingredients in half and work in batches. Refrigerate 8-10 hours. Garnish with avocado and crostini while plating. Makes 6-8 servings.
No matter where you are, if you want to invite me and Liz to dinner, we’d love to come. In return, we’ll do our best to be good conversationalists and I’ll document a small piece of your everyday life. We’re fun dinner guests, people. Kids are sometimes skeptical of me, but they love Liz. I’ll give your pets a lot of attention, though. I’m good at that. If you want to invite your weird uncle over for dinner, too, so he’ll stop bugging you, now’s the time! I’ll talk to him so you don’t have to.
We live in Little Rock, Arkansas, but I’ll keep a list and when we’re traveling in your area, we’d love to meet you and your family/roommates/cat and enjoy a home-cooked meal. Email me at gchoate17 (at) outlook [dot] com with the subject line: Dinner at Our House.
