Saturday 23 June 2012

Custard's Last Stand - Home Cooking Beats the Restaurant

I'm over restaurants! The experience is too random for me, sometimes drafty, sometimes expensive and often impersonal. So lately I've become a big fan of the gentle art of dinner parties.

We've got enough new and old friends now, in this little seaside town of Nelson, to lead to invites and returns for dinners at home. Usually the hosts are fifty-somethings, like us, and they both make an effort to prepare the dishes. We often try things made with seasonal produce from our own gardens, or the local market, and we nearly always end up swapping ideas for recipes, good books and films.

TV cooking shows like Masterchef have inspired us all. We are 'plating' not serving, and 'resting' not cooling! And of course we all have recipe books from way back, and more recent purchases, that are being used. Our generation has survived the pressure years of feeding our kids and their friends, and now we can relax and enjoy the process again, and be a bit more experimental.   

It's fun spending a few hours in a warm home with friends and a good bottle of wine or too, especially in winter! It doesn't have to be fancy food, with expensive ingredients, from a designer kitchen - it just takes time to create the basics for a charming, comfortable evening.

There seems to be about five things which we and our friends do to make dinner parties a better experience than a typical restaurant outing:
1. A comfortable pace, not rushed, just eating things as they are ready
2. A dish with a good story attached - 'this recipe is from that funny old book we got at the garage sale... we always make this to use up Aunt Edna's marmalade...'
3. Something homegrown, locally sourced or substituted in a recipe, or maybe the return of a good old comfort food, like custard
4. The table or room - candles, some embroidered linen, retro place mats or an intriguing item from overseas travels

5. Conversation and laughter - sharing stuff

The restaurants that try to capture this atmosphere, and these values, are the ones that will always be more appealing to people like us...

Lizzie