I am selling this to you as the dinner party that you make for friends on a Sunday night, when you want to be surrounded by loved ones who will surround your dinner table and everything is cozy and nice and easy. It’s a menu that’s casual and meant to be hardly any work at all. Lots of one-bowl, one-pot, one-tray stuff. And it is. Honestly.
Until it wasn’t.
I’m not bragging when I say I’ve thrown a dinner part or two in my time, more complicated than this. I’m telling you so you understand why I can’t understand how I screwed this up so royally on a recent Saturday night when I had friends over and I burned the sauce, forgot to add cream to a simple batter for the dessert, and almost had to order a pizza to save dinner. My kichen looked like a tornado hit it and my two friends, regulars at my house for dinner, were like what the hell is wrong with you tonight. They weren’t being unkind, they were asking honestly. They saw how simple the 3-ingredient sauce was to make. It needs almost no monitoring. It’s just, like with, oh anything else, you don’t want to accidentally leave on a high heat forever so 1/4 of it burns to a crust on the bottom of your pan. We still ate it, by the way and it was still delicious–it’s that forgiving despite incidents like this. So I was essentially serving them spaghetti and a salad and it didn’t go so well. What can I say except sometimes, I have one of those nights?
But if you’re not having one of those nights–the nights where if you’d left the house you would hear the whistle of the anvil falling to meet your head as you turned the corner of your street–this is the easiest, laziest dinner party ever. It’s also 100% comforting, devour-able, and worthy of your best friends. It’s the one to serve your best friends, to encourage that Sunday night gathering, when we’re all busy getting ready for the week and don’t know if we can get together. Get together. Just read your horoscope first. If it warns you to stay in bed, that’s the only time this one might not work out for you.
a lazy, sunday, spaghetti dinner party (all the recipes you need, below)
nibbles: fried olives and fried leek chips
marcella hazan’s famous tomato sauce and crazy spaghetti
burrata with pumpkin seed pesto and chiles
wild arugula salad w/ parmesan snow
chocolate banana stuffed french toast pockets, with maple syrup and cream