Columnist
Ican’t cook. I use my smoke alarm as a timer. I once went to the corner store and asked for a ‘pinch of nutmeg’ and a ‘clove of crushed garlic’, so it’s no wonder I find throwing a dinner party more gruelling than a samurai initiation.
I’ve tried, I truly have. When you wish upon a Michelin star, dreams can come true, right? Wrong. As a newlywed, my first dinner party attempt was duck à l’orange. I braised the duck successfully but the gravy was a lumpen disaster. I was in danger of being arrested for carrying a congealed weapon.
The next recipe I failed to master was salmon Wellington. I remembered to lightly flour the tray but forgot about the cat. An attempt to ‘julienne’ the vegetables left me with lacerated digits and while I was busy retrieving my pinky tip from the bowl (finger food, literally), the cat stripped all the fish off the pastry sheets. I had to substitute salmon with canned tuna, disguised in a haemorrhage of ketchup.
Guests peered quizzically at their plates, unsure of what I’d served them – not so much cuisine as quiz-ine.
The coq au vin got off to a bad start when I realised the chicken pieces were still frozen in the middle. As the microwave had fused (rule one: when melting butter, remove foil wrapper), guests arrived to find me defrosting the chicken with a hairdryer (don’t try this… ever!). Luckily, lots of good champagne meant that my visitors were soon getting on like a house on fire… And it nearly was – I’d left an oven mitt too near the hob! Before we knew it, we were all sluiced in fire extinguisher foam. Well, the recipe did say ‘serve in a delicious froth’.
From then on, I just learnt to think creatively – anything burnt I call ‘Cajun’ and everything undercooked is ‘ceviche’. But it’s all just so exhausting, isn’t it? Throwing a dinner party is a form of S&M – ‘sado-mastication’. You invite people over, who eat and drink you out of house and home, trash the joint, then leave without doing the washing-up.
