I am, if I may say, so proud of myself. We had a ‘Lost’ party yesterday for our three friends (James, Charles, Kari) who had never seen the show. I think the secret to the succesful Manhattan party is to keep the guest list to no more than four people.
The day went something like this:
10am – Damon and I break out all the Hawaii decorations he used to suprise me on ‘Back to Kauai’ night
11amish – Kari, James and Charles show up. Everyone is given a lei, handed a glass full of ice and a generous shot of vodka and directed to the bloody mary bar. On the bar I put: a pitcher of chilled spicy bloody mary mix, horseradish, worcestershire, hot sauce, celery sticks, celery salt, pepper, green olives and pepperocinis.
noon – We watch the ‘Lost’ pilot while eating popcorn, chips and salsa and drinking the above.
1:30 – We break out extra large pitas and put out the pizza bar — pizza sauce, two kinds of cheese, mushrooms, olives, onion, spinach, pepperoni, garlic, crushed red pepper, pepperocini, green peppers.
The “bar” approach turns out to be an enormous hit and will be liberally used for parties going forward.
I stopped paying attention to time here, but the rest of the night went as such:
We watched several more episodes of ‘Lost,’ breaking between each to theorize, talk about who’s sexy and chat about whatever.
Around nine I broke out the fondue pot and we sat around the coffee table Asian-style, watching tv and eating. The fondue was gruyere cheese with garlic and white wine. We put out a few different kinds of bread cubes (dark and light)cherry tomatoes, pearl onions, cornichons and apple chunks. This is also where I brought out the sangria I’d made the day before — white wine with pears, oranges and blackberries.
The capper was a fantastic desert I found at Costco — an assortment of sorbets, each in the appropriate skin or shell. Orange mango in a halved orange skin, etc. The other flavors were lemon, coconut, pina colada (in a pineapple half) and pineapple. I bought them in a box from a warehouse store so I wasn’t sure how good they’d be, but they were wonderful.
We finally wrapped it up at about 11:30 — half way through the season and the whole way through a ton of good food. Everyone left saying, “This was SO MUCH FUN!” so I felt pretty good. And the truth is that while it was a full day it really was very easy to put together. Removing the need to do things like get a meal out the door with all the dishes ready to go at the same time made everything pretty simple. I mean, everyone made their own pizzas. What could be easier than that?
jaysaint 