Saturday, January 1, 2005.
Thirty People And A Porterhouse.
It has been a long time since I was up till three in the morning on New Year's Eve. And I was having fun then. It's just as well that last night was not much of a party--the primary activity was chauffeuring our fifteen-year-old son Jude to a party, then getting home through dense fog (and fireworks-generated smoke). So I didn't awaken with a hangover. Just tired, at about eight.
But I had to get up. We have thirty people coming over in mid-afternoon, and my wife Mary Ann was telling me that we didn't have enough food. The centerpiece of my plan was a thirteen-pound bone-in porterhouse steak, left over from a dinner I'd done about a month ago. That seemed to me to be enough protein, even for thirty. Mary Ann didn't think so, and she began running down an inventory of what we had in the freezer. She concluded we needed to use two big pieces of pork loin, all the sausage in there, and some chicken from the store to boot.
We needed to go to the store anyway, for the obligatory cabbage and black-eye peas. And ice, and a few other things. To my great surprise, Rouse's in Covington was completely out of cabbage. They told me that this was the case in stores all around town. That's no great loss for my table, but would I be sued by my guests if they have a bad 2005 financially? I decided the risk was too great, so I went off to Winn-Dixie, where, to my relief, I found not only green but red cabbage--everything I needed for the cole slaw.
Rouse's did have some nice, ripe avocados at the lowest price I've seen in a couple of years--sixty-nine cents each, as opposed to the now-common two bucks. I bought a bunch of those for guacamole, as well as everything else the recipe requires (cilantro, a lime, and an onion).
The pork loins were by this time thawed by the microwave oven (it took forty minutes). I fired up the charcoal in the pit, seasoned the loins and the gigantic wonk of beef, and started it all to cooking by about noon. At two, the inside of the porterhouse was still reading barely a hundred degrees--nowhere near rare, even.
Fortunately, nobody who knows us well shows up at our parties on time. And we had enough food out that we could stall another hour, but which time all the meat--which, we saw now, was about twice as much as was needed--was fully cooked and ready to go. The beef broke my heart. It was rare in the very center, but most of it was pretty well done--not what I, at least, was looking forward to eating. But then my twelve-year-old daughter Mary Leigh came into the kitchen and told me that she thought the beef was scrumptious, and asked whether there was any more. "There must be plenty out there," I said.
"No, it's all gone!" she reported. Good!
Then, bad. Mary Ann's brother Patrick, who had been playing football with a couple of other older guys and a half-dozen teenage sons and nephews, came in looking pale. Doug Swift, one of our guests, is a physician, and after a quick check of Pat's vital signs thought that he wasn't having a heart attack, but that he should go to the emergency room. Nine one one had already been called, and they were here impossibly soon. (I wondered how they found us so easily, but I guess those onboard computers reveal even our mysterious location out here in the woods.)
As the med techs worked, I felt a little funny about the fact that I was carving meat and everybody was piling plates. It seemed as if the festivity had to wind down before the somber situation could be realized by everybody. His wife and kids, of course, were much more upset. A couple of days later, after Patrick had been fully tested and found to be all right--it seems to have just been overexertion, which Mary Ann says is typical of the way Patrick plays--he called to tell us the good news, and to say he heard he'd missed a good party.
And it was, really. We went through a magnum of Veuve Clicquot, then a bottle of Domaine Chandon brut de noirs, then halfway through a bottle of Laurent Perrier Brut Rose. And about half of the food, the overabundance of which was truly ridiculous. And good, too. Chuck Billeaud brought a great bread pudding with whiskey sauce AND a chocolate doberge, and from some unknown donor there was a stollen from Maurice's. Too much food. and even more cleanup. We left most of it for tomorrow. I, for one, was all done in.
