MFK Fisher once said, "Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly", and the same, I think, could be said for cooking food cooperatively: While cooking for friends and cooking with friends can both be successful, they require - per baby boys and girls when it comes to changing diapers - distinct sets of operating instructions.
If you've already got Champagne and caviar lying about, then by all means, use it, and with neither apology nor reservation. But here is my contribution: Whatever you do, make sure you serve something that will get you lucky. As it happens - to nobody's surprise, at least if they're regular readers - we in the Proximal Kitchen are nothing if not opinionated, and we love most of all to pontificate about which foods and wines are most likely to earn you flirty looks and even messier sheets, and we've got just the ticket:
I once asked a dear friend of mine, a man with at least several points more of IQ than a low-grade fever claims in mercury and a penchant for securing invitations from the hipster set, why he refuses to go out on new years' eve, and he told me, in no uncertain terms, "it's the ultimate rookie night". And he's right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go out and celebrate, and why I'm taking my wife to lunch instead of dinner. What, really, is more luxuriant, more celebratory, than ordering a cocktail or a glass of bubbly at lunchtime, or walking out of a nice restaurant, arm in arm and a little warm and tipsy, in broad daylight? It's very nearly downright naughty, and who's not a fan of that?
Top dining and restaurant spots for NYE 2010.
Perhaps Will Shakespeare lived in Northern California and craved a salad in winter when he spoke of those days, green in judgment and cold in blood; or maybe I'm just projecting because, as recently as yesterday, I was talking about this salad I had made, borne of winter crops, which still I took to be a very-nearly-classic Salade Nicoise, but for the outrage of tomatoes in absentia, and it got me thinking: What, really, constitutes the One, True Thing, the Nicoise that casts its shadow on the wall?
The degree to which this - a Salade Nicoise, sans tomates - is, in fact, a Nicoise salad remains debatable. What is incontrovertible is that, while I won't eat out-of-season tomatoes, I'm not waiting around until next summer for the league leader in salads-as-meals, and this, my Jack Frost version extant, still tastes damn good.
Sandwich shop slated for a winter opening
Hawk's Feather Olive Oil, Spices and a new chef in the Peter Lowell's kitchen
Purloined Petaluma mascot was a favorite of locals
Belvedere opens a new restaurant with the HP staff.
