Come, dine with me

If you are feeling stressed about entertaining at home after a long hiatus, here are some tips

 

I am happy to report that I have crossed another milestone in my post-pandemic life. I had friends over for dinner for the first time since Corona upended all our lives. My husband and I had been venturing out to the homes of close friends over the past couple of months. But somehow we hadn’t got around to entertaining at home. Last week, however, we decided it was time to bite the bullet and get some friends over for a home-cooked meal, instead of venturing out to restaurants as we had been doing until now. 

 

And I am so glad that we did. It was such an amazing feeling to sit around the table with friends we had known forever, eating a simple meal – sausages on a bed of peppers, a pasta with tomato sauce, roasted potatoes, and a caprese salad – that I had spent the entire afternoon cooking, sipping on some red wine, and chatting endlessly about topics both sublime and ridiculous. 

 

Laughter rang out all around the house, the pink roses I had bought specially for the occasion permeated the air with their sweet smell, and all felt right with the world again. In fact, it felt so right that I wondered why I had spent so much time agonizing about the evening, worrying about what to cook, what tableware to use, what drinks to serve, and other useless stuff like that. As it turned out, all we needed was some simple food, some full-bodied wine, and the company of one another to have a fabulous time. 

 

In case you too are agonizing about entertaining at home after a hiatus of a couple of years, here are some tips based on my own personal experience.

 

·       A little clutter never hurt anyone. Don’t agonize over getting the house looking pristine just because you are having friends over. There is no need to erase every sign of your presence in the house just because you are entertaining. You can leave your books and magazines strewn about, you don’t have to plump up every cushion, and you certainly don’t need to dust every house plant. This is your home, the place you live in, not a sterile, impersonal hotel room. So, don’t try to make it look like one.

·       If you plan to cook for your friends, spend some time and effort in planning the menu. I always try to make one dish that can be cooked in advance the day before and benefits from overnight refrigeration. If you are making three things on the day of the party, then try and make two things that can be cooked in the afternoon and finished/reheated in the oven or microwave just before dinner is served. Don’t make more than one dish – or, at a pinch, two – a la minute, or you will be too stressed to actually enjoy the evening. And don’t be shy about supplementing your efforts with a couple of store-bought items (salami, sausages, etc.); not everything has to be made from scratch even if you did promise them a home-cooked meal.

·       The secret to hosting a good dinner party is to keep your hosts – and yourselves – well lubricated. If you are feeling nervous about entertaining at home because you feel you have lost the knack of hosting, pour yourself a drink before your guests arrive, and spend 15 minutes just chatting with your other half to calm yourself down. Keep the drinks coming once your guests get there, until everyone is just a tiny bit merry. You can switch to wine with dinner, and slip in some brandy or port with the cheese and dessert. Just make sure that nobody is driving home after, before you begin pouring!

·       And if things do wrong, don’t fret about it. If your souffle doesn’t rise, it’s not a calamity. If the pasta is a bit overcooked, the heavens will not fall. If the meat in the biryani is not perfectly tender; it doesn’t really matter. Your guests are not Michelin inspectors who have come to grade your meal; they are friends who have come to enjoy an evening in your company. The food is not the point; you are. Remember that, and you can’t go wrong.

 

Life is for living

Getting back to normal – one baby step at a time 

 

So, finally, after many months of breathless anticipation, one of my fantasies came true. I finally managed to meet my girlfriends – in person, no less! – for coffee. (What did you think I was on about? Honestly, get your mind out of the…well, never mind!)

 

All three of us had been double jabbed, the requisite waiting period for immunity to kick in was over (during which one of us had even had a mild case of Covid), and we had been adhering to social distancing norms like our lives depended on it (spoiler alert: they did). So, as the case load in Delhi fell to under 200 daily cases and the positivity rate went below 1 per cent, we decided that it was time we threw caution – and our masks – to the wind and finally met up for a cup of coffee. 

 

That said, we were still wary enough not to risk congregating in a public place full of unmasked strangers. So, we opted to meet at the home of one of us, sitting in an airy, well-ventilated room, which looked out on a verdant lawn, exchanging elbow bumps rather than hugs as a concession to the virus. In the event, it was too hot a morning for coffee, so all three of us chose to have nimbu pani instead, loaded with lots of ice and a divine hint of kala namak. 

 

And as we quaffed our drinks and exchanged gossip, often talking over one another in our excitement to finally be together, it finally felt that life was returning to normal – or, at least, to a semblance of normalcy.

 

Don’t get me wrong. We had been Zooming one another regularly all through the pandemic so it wasn’t as if we had lost touch. But there was something truly special to finally see each other in the flesh, to comment on how good someone’s hair was looking, how perfect the other’s outfit was, and how much I loved the new nail polish they had experimented with during the lockdown. 

 

So, there we sat, goofy smiles on all our faces, feeling giddy with pleasure at being able to properly connect with one another at last. And when we said goodbye a couple of hours later, it was with tight hugs, the elbow bumps having been retired in an unspoken consensus.

 

I felt so good after this close encounter, that I was emboldened to plan another: this time a dinner at the home of one of our closest friends. It would be just the four of us – all of us double jabbed – and we would catch up over a few bottles of wine and maybe the odd glass of champagne. And so, for the first time ever since Covid struck, we sat down to dinner at a table with another couple, to feast on roast lamb, salad, quiche, and some delicious conversation.

 

It really felt as if a dam had burst, as all the stuff that had been festering deep within us came bubbling to the surface. We discussed everything under the sun: the state of the economy; the travels we had undertaken over the last few months; how their daughter was missing out on the teenage experience having been stuck at home for more than a year; the books we had read and written; and so much more. 

 

It felt so amazing to just sit down and talk. And talk to people that we could actually see, whose expressions we could react to in real time, instead of images on a screen whose visual cues were often impossible to pick up on. So novel was this feeling after a year and a half of isolation that we stayed up way later than we should have, exchanging gossip, reminiscing about past times, and storing up memories for the future.

 

As my husband and I drove back home that night, we promised ourselves that this would not be a one-off. We would be rejoining the world of the living, Coronavirus be damned. And, if you ask me, it’s not a moment too soon.

Eat, play, love

That’s my idea of a perfect weekend; what’s yours?

So, it is Sunday morning. And you’re sitting at the breakfast table, maybe taking a desultory look at the papers as you sip your tea or coffee. It’s a nice feeling isn’t it, not to have to worry about getting dressed and heading out to work. To be able to just take your time and enjoy the morning.

I know, it seems rude to interrupt your reverie, to intrude into your leisure, but would you mind terribly if I asked you a question? Nothing complicated, I promise. It’s as simple as it gets.

What is your idea of a perfect weekend?

It’s a question that I posed every week to one hapless celebrity or another when I edited a supplement called Weekend in a previous incarnation. But it’s not nostalgia for an earlier life that has brought on my current interrogative mood. I only ask because I recently endured a weekend from hell – in the company of friends who, to be fair to them, were only trying to show me a good time.

Only it didn’t seem like that to me. I had to drag myself out of bed at some unearthly hour, get dressed while it was still dark outside, then drive for what seemed like forever along pot-holed roads which rattled bones that I didn’t know existed, and then, a hair-raising speedboat ride later, arrive at a pebbly, thoroughly depressing stretch of sand they rather optimistically designated as the ‘beach’.

There was some desultory attempt at swimming; there were some token efforts to get the kids to give up on their Ipods and enjoy the sound of crashing waves; there may even have been the odd singalong. But quite honestly, I was too exhausted to care. All I wanted was to curl up and go back to sleep in a shady corner.

But no, there was still the small matter of the picnic basket to negotiate. So, we spread out a large blanket, opened up the hampers and obediently cooed over their contents. As we chomped on our sandwiches and drank wine that turned lukewarm in minutes, the humidity turned my hair into a crinkly mess, sweat ran down my face and the sand got everywhere. Then, after assuring one another about how wonderful it had been to enjoy the great outdoors, we got back into the car and drove back another couple of hours, being jolted and jostled all the way.

I have to admit that the other members of my party were delighted with the excursion. I was the only one longing to get back home, get under the shower, wash away the sweat and sand, climb into my pyjamas, and hit the couch for a bit of mindless television viewing before the workday week began again.

But then, I guess everyone has their own ideas of a perfect weekend. Young parents dream about dumping their two under four with the grandparents for a couple of days and taking off for a romantic getaway far away from dirty nappies and night-time feeds. Grandparents long for weekends when the snotty-faced mites are deposited on their doorsteps. House-bound homemakers look forward to a night out on the tiles with their better halves. Harried careerists want nothing more than just to sleep, sleep, sleep away the weekend, catching up on a week-long deficit.

There are perhaps as many perfect weekend scenarios as there are people. There are some who like to party hard right into the early hours of the morning; sleep off the hangover and head out to a late boozy lunch. There are others who want to get up early enough to take a walk in the park before breakfast. There are some who want to take off for a scenic spot with their loved ones. And then, there are those who don’t even make it past the front door.

Speaking for myself, I like to ease myself into the weekend with a late-night movie on Friday (dinner is, of course, industrial quantities of popcorn and Diet Coke). Saturdays are for girlie lunches, with lots of white wine, loads of gossip and the odd bitchy outbreak, and dinners are at home with friends with everyone pitching in behind the stove. Sundays are for large, lavish brunches – either at home or a favourite restaurant – which last late into the afternoon and are followed by a long siesta. Sunday evenings are a time to recuperate for the week ahead; so it’s simple ghar ka khana with a good book or a DVD box-set to provide entertainment.  

That’s pretty much an ideal weekend as far as I am concerned.

My weekends from hell involve driving miles and miles to get to a place that isn’t even worth the fuel cost; and then spending a nano-second there before having to head back. If I want to spend time at a beautiful resort over the weekend, I’m going to save both energy and time by flying not driving, thank you very much. Other no-nos are wasting entire evenings at large parties, trying to make small talk with people I’ll never see again in my life.

When it comes to weekends, I like to keep it as simple as possible, involving only family and close friends, and lots of downtime. Which brings me back to my original question: what is your idea of a perfect weekend. Tweet replies to my twitter handle please!