The Death of the Dinner Party

And the limits of Cooking for Charity, Family + Community

Chapter One: The Death of Charity

Compared to a lot of people, our pandemic was not terrible.

We stayed healthy, avoided Covid, and kept ourselves busy running a free pantry and fridge, feeding our downtown Vegas community, in our front yard.

That pantry probably saved my sanity. It gave all of us community-minded jobs to keep us busy. My son, Raffi, had a job breaking down cardboard boxes that leftover grocery store food came in. David hauled those boxes out of trucks so I could sort through them. My teen daughters served people home cooked meals, packed to-go boxes. My littlest Desi took care of one unhoused woman’s dog, Princess, when she was sick. Once I walked in the house and found my husband David making eggs with an unhoused man named Stefran. They just stood together in the kitchen eating their eggs, scraping yokes, dipping toast, talking about Fabio, as if this kind of openness with strangers happened all the time.

In some ways it did that year.

The pantry opened our eyes to the way people struggled and how the systems around us often burden the most vulnerable people. The pantry killed a lot of the boundaries of class that most of us in the middle class are insulated by.

I learned. A lot.

We can walk by an unhoused person on the street - I do it every day, multiple times - but you can’t walk by when you are feeding people. Feeding people makes you sticky. You can’t run away from whatever the reality is in front of you. And you quickly find out feeding people matters, but it hardly fixes anything.

I say in my book, The Meth Lunches (out October 10 with St. Martin’s Press): “Lunch doesn't save a life.” And I mean it.

Many of the people who came to get food at the pantry became our friends, always separated with masks and six feet of distance, but friends none the less. These folks stood in our yard and told us about their lives, and we told them about our lives and somehow the humanness of it all, the back and forth, was a balm.

It wasn’t everything. It cured nothing. It barely changed what people went through. But it was something.

It made me realize that charity, pantries, and food banks, can miss the entire picture of how to fix people’s entrenched poverty and that at some point, I felt as though all my efforts, as well as every other helper’s efforts, were enabling the US government to simply leave people to wallow in intergenerational poverty and hardship.

Anti-hunger people are quick to criticize each other (and I have certainly done the same (see my last post about the hybrid pantry/supermarket, which I feel might be ill-fated) But shouldn’t our anger be directed at federal and state governments who want people to eat from food banks because it feels like we are doing good for people (Dems) and because it stimulates business for commodity crop farmers (Republicans) without really creating a long-lasting solution?

There is a reason that food banks are supported across the board by both Republicans and Democrats. A lot of people benefit. But not the poor, elderly, disabled and mentally ill.

Even now, people ask when we are going to re-start 100 Dinners - a pandemic-born program that allowed our cookbook group, Please Send Noodles, to make wholesome home-cooked meals for people that they could safely pick up in the trunks of their car and then reheat in their homes. Truth be told, even though people need it badly and we could be churning out hundreds of meals every month, the very idea of it feels futile, like we are doing it to keep our affluent hands busy, while people struggle and flounder around us.

I can’t drudge up the will to do the government’s job anymore.

Chapter Two: The Death of Book Writing

I got a book deal with St. Martin’s right after the pantry closed (largely because I won a James Beard award for an essay I wrote in 2020, a stroke of dumb luck, which is now a book chapter. Awards help you get book deals, and I’m sure no one would’ve given me a deal without it)

The city closed down the pantry after a year. I started writing immediately and because of the focus required to do that, I made my world epically small - I focused on my family and my writing, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. Had I not done that, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to 1) make my deadlines and 2) be there for David and the kids.

I was a mess the whole time, but she got done. LOL

David also took over even more than before, tending to our special needs children, while I made sure I got enough sleep and pecked away at the computer every day, while coming out bleary-eyed, words jangling around in my brain, to love on people and cobble together dinner. He read and re-read drafts, refused to let me write bullshit or cave to my usual tropes. He cajoled and coached me through the writing of the book.

To say the book never would’ve happened without him is a massive understatement.

It takes a village to write a book. Or at the very least, if you are lucky, a supportive, loving partner who gets you, won’t let you be lazy, tells it bluntly as you need to hear it, and has a solid eye for editing. If the book is any good, it’s on the both of us.

Still with all the lingering COVID issues, staying close to home and keeping our lives small, felt right. For awhile, I leaned into this hard and even fantasized that we could live the rest of our lives this way, as if this could work for the rest of the family. LOL I embraced it, the way you embrace something that completely envelopes you and drags you under.

Writing. Family. Writing. Family.

It went on this way for months that became a year and I leaned so hard into it I had no desire to change it or leave it behind. By the time I finished the book, and the constantly resurfacing edits, over another year, I had worked myself into a mild depression and at David’s insistence, sought out a therapist to cope.

But the book was done, and COVID was ever-present but ebbing, and it was time to look outward again.

Except I didn’t really want to.

Chapter Three: The Death of Sport Cooking

When I walked into the pandemic, I was a serious-enough cook.

My friend, Melissa Clark, recipe writer at the New York Times, and author of one of the best books of everyday cooking, once hilariously called this “sport cooking.”

Sport cooks are the ones who learn to butcher an elk just to know how to do it, and if you go into their garage you will find the elk there, hanging fresh and grizzly on a hook, and they are holding a hatchet, and explaining about how to separate the ribs from the breastbone, and why a small hatchet does the job better than a knife, and inside that same sport cook’s house, they will set you up with a cold, nearly frozen, can of Asahi and make you a righteous elk patty melt with Swiss and gruyere, and caramelized onions that they happen to have on hand, and just the right dollop of Russian on your skillet-toasted home-made rye.

During our years together, David and I did a lot of sport cooking. Parties for the casts of his shows with a hundred people. Whole hog backyard cooking. We made our own charcuterie and cheese. We smoked meats and fish. We did a Kamayan feast for the neighborhood one New Years Eve. We cooked out of a food truck at Burning Man, while producing a full-scale circus. Made Christmas night hot pot for beleaguered, holiday-weary parents, and a Yakitori free-for-all for every Thanksgiving.

Dinner parties and food events were a part of us. Maybe even a part of our identity. But the pandemic changed us.

My mother died alone in a nursing home on the other side of the country during the most intense months of COVID. And even more terrifying, David had a heart attack that left him thinking about his and our mortality. We took stock to consider what the purpose of everything was. We had long conversations in bed, a local dive bar, in the mornings on the patio while the temps were still cool, in the car on long drives to California, Utah or Mexico with kids muffled by headphones and iPads. We sent each other links to articles to read and then later discuss.

How much time did we really have left? And how did we want to use it? What did we want our lives to be like from now on?

We focused on health. We focused on feeding ourselves in all the ways. And part of that was managing the food issues of our kids. I wrote a bit about sharing my kitchen with my teens here, but the younger kids struggled more, the youngest with her very narrow scope of preferred foods over and over, teriyaki chicken for months, then, quesadillas, then months of sausage patties and ketchup, followed by more months of sour cream pancakes, now we are onto hot dogs. There are nights we make her three or four separate meals, all that she refuses to eat for one reason or another. Our son also struggles with his compulsive desire for sugar and sweets and trashy fast food, his need to fill an invisible hole, that came with him when he came to us from foster care at four years old.

Cooking for kids with eating issues is the exact opposite of sport cooking. It feels lame and futile and microwaveable and un-Instagrammable, not something I can or want to share. And for many folks, it can ostracize people from community rather than encourage it.

Like lots of other people, the space of the pandemic helped changed the trajectory of David’s career in such a good way. He was home more. Happier with his work. And with the writing of the book, mine changed too.

We spent a lot of time trying to be better parents to our kids; supporting our oldest daughter (18) through her bipolar diagnosis, which she allowed me to write about, (17) Edie’s always-festering anxiety, my anxiety is also hers. Raffi’s (12) developmental trauma that left him misbehaving his way through school after school, none of them able to handle his trauma and his rage and his disabilities, and Desi, the baby, (8) who can total a room, pummel perfectly solid dining room chairs and clear book shelves with the her rage. A combination of her autism and early in-utero drug and alcohol exposure.

We doubled down. The doubling down felt right.

After all, you can’t invite people in when kids are hurling dining room chairs across the room, or when one of your children is curled up on the bathroom floor because there are aliens attacking her and the bathroom is the only safe place?

How do you let people into that? How do you spend extra money, cooking, prepping, shopping and preparing your broken ass house for people to come in when it all feels stupid to waste your energy on nurturing other people, because it takes your nurturing energy away from the people you love the most and who need you the most?

How do sport cooking and dinner parties fit into that?

Everything felt clear. Stay small. Focus.

Chapter Four: The Death of the Kitchen Dwellers

A food gathering with guests often requires shopping at multiple markets all over town, extra money to make the right food and alcohol purchases, thinking about what to serve and how to serve it. You need room in your brain. Mental space. A certain balance of chaotic-calmness that can nurture creativity, the fun hand-wringing over what to make and how to best make it. There is menu planning: how to make the night fun for everyone and also make something new and exciting for the cook?

There is also the reaching out to people. The being social.

Every event I’ve been to or created or participated in since the pandemic has left me wanting it to end at least an hour earlier than it did.

This feels otherworldly because what I loved most about the before-times dinner party was the last die-hard guests pulled up around the table, drinking wine or vodka out of small glasses, making speeches, picking at whatever dishes are leftover, a little bleary eyed but also full of intimate and deep stories, lots of big laughter, that linger between a few of us into the late night.

I also loved the micro-party that always happened in the kitchen. When I drank at home (I only drink on date night, once a week, with David now, which I’ve written about here) I used to keep Secret Tequila in the kitchen, for the people who liked to stand around and talk while I cooked. I’d pour little tumblers of tequila with hits of lime. Sometimes these Kitchen Dwellers would grab a tool and help chop or stir, or plate while I yelled at kids running under me for touching the food before it hits the table. We Kitchen Dwellers gossiped and whispered while the party raged around us. Those people who like to linger near the cook in the kitchen are, and will be forever, THE BEST.

But now I want other things. One-on-one conversations. Deeper inquiry. Shorter stints of peopling. I want lots of quiet reading. Podcasts in the car. Snuggling. Lots of lazy kid snuggling and movie watching. I want to get up every morning this month and quietly and without ceremony watch the Tour de France with David. I want him to mountain bike everyday as much as he wants because it makes him happy. I want us to be about us, and maybe this is the result of taking care of the community for so long during the pandemic, or that I am preparing for the book launch and the inevitable public exposure, or that I am older and pressing into my own mortality.

I don't fucking know.

But even as I write this, I know we as a family are lighter for having had this time and focus. My teens, both stable on meds and having a ball, are getting to places where they are mastering independence and maturity, and no longer making crazy teen decisions. They travel alone, and in bunches around the world now without us, and I am proud to have been a part of their launch.

We have systems for the younger kids (that don’t always work) but still those systems cradle them, and guardrail them, and support them through their emotional plunges and peaks. David and I are punchier, funnier with each other, cracking jokes and evading kids to have secret time together in the middle of the day. This is a kind of renaissance for us, and we are fully here for it.

Same legs, different walk.

I have no idea how this process of pandemic reckoning will last, or who we will be at the end, but I am not rebelling against it. I am giving in to it, floating willingly with the current.

Chapter Five: The Death of the Dinner Party

On July 4th every year we do this small thing on the street in front of our house.

We stand out in the street sand throw poppers on concrete, light sparklers and set off (legal) fire works in the street, as the big Strip fire works rip above us in the sky. Lucy and Edie were both in NYC watching the fireworks in bikinis on Coney Island. Iconic. A part of their burgeoning independence and love for travel.

Why don’t we do some food out there this year? David asked.

I started thinking of ideas, a frontyard asada, which has been on my mind since this Bricia Lopez cookbook came out, or yakitori like we do every Thanksgiving? I started writing down concepts and ideas feeling both excitement and dread. Lots and lots of dread.

Like, “Okay, I’ll do this for you, honey” dread.

“Yakitori is not exactly July 4th food,” he said laughing.

“I was thinking food on sticks, no plates, no forks,” I said. “Maybe chicken skewers with peanut sauce?”

“Let’s do hot dogs,” he said bluntly.

“They are easy and every kid will eat them.”

And what I felt was…

Relief.

Chapter Six: The Rise of Future Cooking

The only thing I “made” for July 4th was the NYC onion hot dog cart sauce, which is easy and also required for hot dogs, in my estimation. All the NYC transplants - and there are lots of NYC folks here in Vegas - love it.

“The party” which was not a party at all, more like a small neighborly impromptu rumble in the street, was hot dogs on a tiny picnic grill, a slew of jarred condiments, beverages in a properly iced cooler and a box of popsicles that never fully froze and so stayed in the freezer to serve us another day. No chips. No salads. No plates. No hours of cooking or hundreds of dollars in expense. No head filled with menus and slips of paper taped to the shelves above my head, reminding me which dishes need to come off the heat when, and how to finish off and garnish each one. It was just fireworks in the street.

We all ate about 40 dogs. People came and stayed. People came and left. Desi had several meltdowns (holiday celebrations can be super triggering for neuro-diverse kids) and Raffi got completely carried away while the kids took turns lighting fire works, and was blustery and full of anxiety after everyone left (his fight or flight goes haywire during these kinds of activities). But none of that mattered. Everyone there could ride it all out.

It was a messy, unapologetic, simply-prepared, low-bar success.

Will I ever sport cook again? I don’t know. Probably. Something will dazzle my curiosity and I’ll be propelled into making it, I’m sure. But mostly, something in me has broken and been mended together, not quite in the same way.

I’m even toying with the idea that my next book won’t even be a food book. Just leaving behind food writing all together.

Maybe, maybe not.

The pre-game before fire works at dusk.

Chapter Seven: The dream for my future cooking

Two things:

1. For Family + Friends: a return to Kitchen Suppers

David and I did this when our marriage was young and we had babies and couldn’t meet people out at restaurants so much. I got the inspiration from Australian chef Bill Granger, father of the avocado toast. He holds his suppers on a Thursday evening, (Fridays and Saturdays are dinner party nights and require more planning, stress, expectation and expense) Granger serves his guests the kitchen island or table, not the dining room, because the idea is informal to the max, zero stress, all fun.

A Kitchen Supper is a simple or one pot meal. Maybe a salad. A loaf of crusty bread. A couple friends come over and eat. Just a couple. They bring wine, if they want it. It is simple by definition. It is less about the sport cooking and more about intimacy and connection. Elbows on the table, no pretense, maybe we’ll light a candle or something.

This is the anti-dinner party I want in my life.

2. For the community: a revamped version of the church, grange + firehouse dinner

Instead of more relentlessly disempowering charity cooking, I’d like to cook community dinners with other cooks for the whole community.

Wholesome, simply-executed, recognizable, ethnically-appropriate foods, served family-style to whole communities; people who can pay sitting next to those who can’t, the housed making friends with the unhoused, passing plates while kids get fed by hand as they run amuck amid the tables, and someone who needs a job meets someone who can refer them, and someone else who needs a babysitter finds one, and someone with lots of social disabilities or mental illness or stressed-out poverty brain will be accepted even if they are not entirely fun or easy to be around.

If I’m going to cook for lots of people again, it must be like this now.

We’ve all been through too much, we know too much, to have it any other way.