Geoff Bartakovics - Tasting Table Cooking with Friends: Recipes for Modern Entertaining

Recipes for Modern Entertaining

photography by
TODD COLEMAN

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To Jenn Hirano

Tonights party is going to be epic.

Youve planned and prepped and cooked and cleaned and tablescaped your place within an inch of its life. The bar is a sparkling altar of bottles and bitters and heaping buckets of steaming ice. The candles are lit, the trash taken out. An excited calm descends as the kitchen buzzes with friends cutting lime wheels, and you suddenly wonder if you should have invited that couple from CrossFit.

Youd invite them all if there were chairs enough, you think.

The olives belong beside the gleaming glassware and you should test just one more bite of the Duck Fat Chex Mix to be certain. Its perfect. Tonight will be perfect, you know, even when something inevitably goes sideways.

You launch the playlist built especially for tonight, check the time as you grab a cold beer to join you in the shower. T minus 20 minutes as your better half announces, The appetizers smell amazing!

And you didnt martyr yourself to pull today off. A few besties arrived earlier for some cooking and catch-up and just enough day-drinking to keep the laughs rolling. You love these nights and all the thank-you texts that will arrive in the morning.

Now the suns about to set and you notice more voices are joining the kitchen chorus. So you clock your outfit in the mirror one last time and head into the evening.

This is why I host, youre sure, because the party is about these people and if the medium is the message, then this fancy gathering of lowbrow friends will be shouting, Life is good! to anyone within earshot as the taxis pull away tonight.

Partying together makes friendship magic in a way that seems important today, when relationships can dissolve too easily into a blur of digital likes from old friends we see in real life too seldom. The most effective social networking is assigned seating at a dinner, and no activity feed can say I love you guys quite the way a heartfelt toast can.

And so this book.

Todd and I have created Tasting Table Cooking with Friends to update the classic menu cookbook for a new generation of heroic hosts and dinner party emcees. The recipes and cocktails borrow from hot restaurant and ingredient trends to keep things cool, and we designed menus for the way we live today.

Whats most modern is that each menu is designed for collaboration so that a few friends can host together. No two recipes require the oven at different temperatures at the same time, for example, and there are recipes at different skill levels so that everyone can lend a hand. Sure, you still have to manage the invitations and order the groceries. But crowdsourced cooking (and cleanup, if youre lucky) makes entertaining easier so you can do it more often.

And thats the real point of this book: We hope it will inspire you to gather more often with the people you love. To feed friendship regularly with shared experience and table-shaking laughter. To create lasting memories through meals made and enjoyed together.

To make life larger by partying harder.

So embrace your inner cruise director! Go send that save-the-date. Collide your friend groups and manage the aftermath. Borrow chairs from neighbors and build a bar with your best glasses. Top it off before you raise a toast. Lower the lights and then turn it up.

Make that party. Gather who matters. Be the magic.

Geoff Bartakovics, 2019

Cooking with Friends has been designed so that all the recipes in a menu can be prepared by a handful of cohosts cooking as a team in just a few hours. Dishes generally dont require the same tools or appliances at the same time, so you can prepare the entre on the cooktop while one friend preps the salad near the sink and another mixes cake batter on the kitchen table.

Of course you could make these menus on your own by allowing generous lead time. Every recipe is a winner on its own or as part of a menu dreamed up entirely by you. But if you want to cook with friends the way we imagined, here are a couple of options to consider.

1. Invite a few cohosts to cook with you. Review the recipes to decide exactly how much time youll need for each menu, but two or three friends should be able to cook, batch the signature cocktail, and set the table in about three hours.

2. Source the groceries, liquor, and supplies. For a stress-free experience, have all the ingredients purchased by the night before, including basic staples (salt, sugar, butter, olive oil, not-outdated spices, foil, and plastic wrap) and equipment.

3. Organize your kitchen and game plan.