Gather Your Friends—Easy Recipes for Informal Dinners

Gather your family and friends. Welcome them to the table. Sharing food—the bonds that it creates, the ties, the values, the friendships old and new that are affirmed and nourished—accomplishes more than any other activity to foster a sense of community. Gathering around the table deepens the web of life. Sharing food is an intimate act that brings us together for raucous laughter, secrets revealed, great stories and taboo subjects discussed. Breaking bread and opening a bottle of fine wine is a welcome respite to the cascade of world news and pressing day-to-day life. It’s the most profound way to savor the fragrance of time together. So, to the table, for long dinners, often. Gather your friends. Celebrate the brightness of being together. Linger late into the night. Then linger some more.

Throughout the book, these themes are returned to and addressed from various perspectives.

Eat fresh, eat seasonally, eat locally. The best ingredients ensure the best results.

Cook for small groups of friends versus larger groups. Smaller dinner parties create keener bonds, more profound conversations and a tighter knitting of the group into a collective spirit. There are also fewer hours of mincing, chopping and washing.

Choose simple versus complex menus. It’s tempting to create a grandiose menu because we love our friends. But they’re coming to dinner to be with us. They care little about a complicated dinner. Trim the number of appetizers. Eliminate the first course. Simplify whenever possible.

Give “We” versus “I” dinners. Ask dinner guests to bring wine, contribute an appetizer or dessert, or turn the chicken on the barbecue. “We” dinners are more relaxed, democratic and fun. Friends want to help.

Do some advance planning. Settle on a menu, make a shopping list, and buy nonperishable goods days in advance. Start the “prep” the night before the dinner. Create an ocean of free time the day of the dinner so that cooking for friends is fun.

Welcome friends with a drink. Celebrate the arrival of friends with bottles of wine uncorked and all the necessities for “mixed drinks” at the ready. A little libation is a wonderful mood elevator.

Gather often. Time is short. Friends are few. Celebrate the magic of being together. Relish the moment. Gather often.

Gather Your Friends is organized around 50 entrées found in the Seafood and Meat chapters. Each entrée recipe provides a suggested menu using recipes drawn from throughout the book. Every accompanying recipe appears with the page number so you can quickly turn to it.

Each recipe serves 8, since smaller gatherings require little advance planning. All recipes can be cut in half and every recipe, except where noted, can be doubled. “Doubled” means everything in the recipe is doubled. Think about this from the point of view of volume. Double the volume and you’ll need to double even strong seasonings such as salt and chili sauce.

Every recipe indicates what can be done in advance and how far ahead.

Highlighted sections called “Keep It Fun” appear throughout the book. These range in subject matter from providing pertinent information for a particular chapter to restating the book’s themes from various perspectives. Just as a dinner party—with its ebb and flow of conversation, the outcome of each recipe, and how these recipes knit together into a meal—is filled with surprises, so many of these “Keep It Fun” insights may offer “a-ha” moments as you plan the next gathering of friends around the table.

Lastly, nothing is said here about the vast subjects of wine, napkin folding, table settings, theme dinners, music selections, flower arranging, round versus rectangular dinner tables, family-style serving, buffet “lines,” food phobias, place-card arrangements, or the high school girl next door. Read on. Perhaps they are addressed.

Publication date August 2008
244 pages, hard cover, from Ten Speed Press

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