Blog.EmealsForYou

Dinner Parties as a Lost Art Form – A Rant

September 10, 2009 at 9:42 am 2 comments

Summer Dinner Party

For those of us who enjoy cooking, dinner parties are the best way to showcase new recipes or highlight old ones.  They are a chance to get together with old friends and to meet new ones.  A chance to share ideas and thoughts with like-minded people and on some occasions a chance to hone our debating skills with those that don’t exactly agree with us.  This is true whether inviting another couple for a summer dinner or large sit-down parties for the roving hordes.  The conversation is the reason… the food the enticement.

So it is with sadness that I find holding a dinner party has become almost impossible in today’s rapid-paced, everyone-going-in-different-directions world.  It used to be deciding on the menu was the hardest part of the planning; now just finding enough people to invite has become the most difficult part.

Obstacles include those with kids’ sport programs that conflict with the party, and those who are consistently on a diet; there is nothing like preparing a great meal only to find someone picking at their food like a kid forced to eat eggplant.  Then there are the people who add nothing to the conversation, remember this is why you have the party in the first place.  Filling a table of eight has become harder than making Julia Child’s Hollandaise while in a body cast.

Bottom line is I hope that I have not lost my touch, hope the dinner party isn’t a lost art; maybe it is only a sign of the times.  For those few of us left let’s raise our glasses in hope of a swing back to what we would call better times.

Entry filed under: Rants, Semi-Rants and Non-Rants. Tags: dinner parties, dinner party, foodies lament, hollandaise, Julia Chicld's hollandaise, parties with old friends, party food.