CHAPTER THREE
BEFORE THE SHOW
You are now fully committed. People are going to come over and be in your home and eat your food. It is at this moment that the amateur dinner party host hyperventilates, sucks down a bunch of Zolofts, and tries to convince an Uber driver to return them to their mother’s womb.
After all, there are hors d’oeuvres to prepare. Hours of music to be selected. You are suddenly certain your entire home must be thoroughly cleaned, and every crevice bombed with antibacterial agents. Maybe you should go to Bed Bath & Beyond and invest in a bushel of potpourri. You will need to hire an expensive DJ and caterers—that’s for sure. While you’re at it, you better also order a tablecloth made of pinktoe tarantula spider silk. Perhaps you should have the house remodeled for the occasion? Yes, who could possibly enjoy themselves in your stupid old house, which does not have an open floor plan? You better knock out half the walls in your house to create an open floor plan or you will be derided as a failure!!
Reader, relax. Do not remodel your home. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, unless your last name is Windsor, people aren’t coming to your party expecting to dine in sumptuous luxury. Remember our MANIFESTO: Perfect imperfection! Humans are not perfect, nor are our homes. This is a party, not a photo shoot for a Swedish travel brochure. This is recess for adults. And like a recess playground, all that’s really necessary is a space conducive to social interaction, where no one’s going to accidentally split their head open.
“I hate parties, so I wouldn’t invite anyone over. But if I had to, I’d invite way more people than I could fit into the apartment, because that would make everybody really grouchy. I like that.”
—OSCAR THE GROUCH (A.K.A. PUPPETEER CAROLL SPINNEY)
Creating such a space does require a modicum of effort, though. And thus the precious few days or hours between sending out your party invites and hooking your guests up to a Pinot Noir IV are critical—though not necessarily expensive or difficult. Read this chapter and we guarantee you dinner party satori. Herein we will help you prepare your party’s a) physical setting, b) music, and c) appetizers. In the process, we will also attempt to make you chuckle four to ten times.
PART 1: SETTING THE SCENE
You are a busy person. Your home is in some state of disorganization. Perhaps you skipped spring cleaning this year. Or for the last several years. To really whip the joint into shape would probably require a janitorial staff, armed with a pressure washer full of toxic cleansers.
Once again, you don’t have to whip the joint into that kind of shape. Let us take you step by step through the minimum amount of toil necessary to create a dinner party–ready physical environment.
Note: These steps are listed in order of importance. The only essential one is the first. Anything after that is gravy.
STEP 1: BATHROOM
Let’s say you take a mystery psychadelic the night before your dinner party and wake up, sans kidney, beneath a pile of strippers on an unmoored boat in the Ohio River. You finally stumble back into your house with five minutes to spare before guests arrive. What should be the first thing you do?
Destroy your cell phone. But after that? Clean your bathroom.
Every other facet of dinner partying can be faked to some extent.1 If all goes absolutely wrong, you can always buy prepared foods to go, you can serve canned beer, you can even use Tinder to find yourself some guests. But you can’t fake a clean bathroom.
Bathrooms are the teeth of your home; they must be maintained not just for the sake of health and hygiene, but because they’re so awful to see in a state of decay. This is the one room in your place in which every guest will spend time alone, probably with a bright overhead light illuminating every corner and surface.
So clean your bathroom and clean it well. If you’re the type of person who thinks it’s totally fine to leave a frosting of shaving cream mottled with stubble on your sink basin and a wet Target circular on the floor next to your toilet, then we suggest you cancel your dinner party, and instead strip to your tighty-whities and cozy up with a TV dinner in your sty, as is likely your custom and preference.
STEP 2: DINING ROOM
The dining room is the main stage of the night. If you’ve cleaned the bathroom and have any time remaining, try making sure the dining room has good lighting and is free of clutter.
Note: By “good” lighting we do not mean “bright” lighting. Indeed, “good” lighting, in a dinner party context, means your dining area would ideally be more Vermeer than interrogation room. To achieve the right effect, deploy candles. Also lampshades.2 Dim light is magic. It makes wrinkles disappear and it makes spills undetectable. It’s like applying a Valencia Instagram filter to everything.
As for clutter, the dining room is a landing pad for food and increasingly tipsy guests. So you might want to remove obstacles that could cause either to fall to the floor. Like the shoes you hurriedly kicked off as you raced into the house to clean up before the party.
Remove keys, piles of mail, and bike parts from the dinner table, lest you try to set a gravy boat atop them and thereby liberally sauce your tablecloth.
If you’ve got a sideboard, it can hold extra napkins, bottles of wine, or art framed under protective glass. But you might want to clear away the vintage Spider-Man issue number one you wanted to show off later in the evening, unless you’re eager for someone to leave a circular wineglass stain on your kid’s future college tuition.
STEP 3: LIVING ROOM
More likely than not, a dinner party will begin and end in the living room. This is where cocktails are served at the start of the night, and where they’re spilled at the end.
There’s only one thing you must do when tidying your living room, and that’s shut off the goddamn television and hide the remotes. As mentioned in chapter one, TVs are a dinner party’s Professor Moriarty, Lex Luthor, and Lord Voldemort combined. They are conversation destroyers and portals into everything a dinner party guest is meant to escape: strangers’ agendas, impersonal entertainment, commercials for adult diapers.
Once the TV is defused, should you have the time, feel free to do the basics: run a vacuum, fluff a pillow, extract any wadded-up paper napkin wontons from between your couch cushions.
Next, maybe take a look at your bookshelves: do those books have the potential to inspire conversation? Seriously: Penny Stocks for Dummies? Quicken 3 User’s Manual? Fast ’n’ Easy Miracle Whip Cookbook? Fodor’s Malta 2005?3 Think about moving these and similar titles to another room, to the bottom shelf, or hey: why not the recycling bin? Throwing a party is a great excuse to purge your home of chaff. Trust us: you won’t miss last year’s Boxes Unlimited catalog.
STEP 4: KITCHEN
Years ago, in one of those New York Times Style pieces disguised as journalism, the “Caligula” look was proclaimed to be “in.” Caligula—as the liberal arts majors and/or Penthouse magazine readers among you may recall—was the unhinged Roman ruler who had a taste for parties, murders, and messes. And according to this article, the new cool thing to do was leave your house in disarray: dirty dishes on the coffee table, soiled glasses on the nightstand, full ashtrays… you get the picture.
Like most Style pieces,4 the story was utter horse hockey created on a dare by a tipsy writer who made up the headline first and then quoted a bunch of pals to “confirm the trend.” As we hope we’re making clear in this chapter, you at least want to attempt some amount of tidiness before company arrives.
There is one room, however, where the Caligula look is not only acceptable but desirable: the kitchen. Olive oil bottles without tops, a colander resting on a coffee mug, flour fingerprints on the cabinets—all great. A sloppy kitchen means good things are afoot. Opened tins and popped bottles create an air of abundance and industry that will contribute to the warmth that is a key ingredient of a dinner party. Here you can be a mad wizard stirring a pot with one hand, cranking the lettuce spinner with the other, phone wedged under your ear, drinking wine through a long straw and shaking your hips to a Missy Elliott number.
In other words, to prep your kitchen for a dinner party, spill something in there.
STEP 5: BEDROOM
Bedrooms are like the secret thoughts nestled deep in the darkest regions of your heart: you don’t necessarily want to share them with everybody. So it’s perfectly legit to make your boudoir off-limits to guests. The universal code to indicate this: Shut the door to your room. Boom, you’re done.5
But maybe you want to show off your bedroom. Or maybe you want to go the classic route and use your bed as a repository for guests’ coats. This is not only practical (we have yet to find a coatrack that can handle twelve winter jackets) but creates an excellent wool, fur, and pleather pile into which your guests’ kids can burrow.
If this is how you want to roll, do a commonsense sweep of the space: make your bed, hide any marital aids. Actually, you may want to do this anyway, just in case: at modern dinner parties, bedrooms often serve as discreet cell phone booths into which guests sneak, in order to check in on babysitters, basketball game scores, or mistresses.
STEP 6: STOP
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve cleaned and arranged far more than necessary and are probably the kind of person who will now compulsively start arranging your socks in alphabetical order by color. Stop, for God’s sake—you’ve got music and hors d’oeuvres to prepare. And take heart: after the party, you get to clean up everything all over again! With a hangover (see chapter seven).
A musicless party is like food without salt: serviceable but dull. Music provides the background energy that makes a dinner party feel less “dinner” and more “party.” Music can trigger nostalgic reveries in your guests or inspire political debate. It can also smooth over any inevitable quiet lulls in conversation, or fill in the astonished silence after the Comedian makes a crude joke about another guest’s disintegrating marriage. Just about the only thing music can’t improve at a party is stale bread. And music can conceivably do that, too, if it gets everyone dancing so hard that the room becomes shrouded with a humidifying fog of sweat.
As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”6
That said, the wrong music, played at the wrong time, via the wrong music system, can also kill a party. Luckily, we are full of insight regarding the preparation and execution of great party music.
STEP 1: CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON
Below are the three party-friendliest technological methods for playing music, in what we believe to be ascending order of excellence.
3. Classical, Jazz, or College Radio
You may have neither the time nor the inclination to amass a personal music collection. Or you may earn a meager income you must spend on, like, food and utility bills, rather than on music and equipment through which to play it. For you, there is gloriously free broadcast radio.
Alas, we cannot recommend that you tune in most commercial radio stations because, um, the word “commercial” is right in their name. Indeed, for every one song played, you will hear three billionmillion commercials. Remember what we said about not befouling your dinner table with corporate packaging? Same rule applies to your guests’ ears.
Luckily, most jazz and classical stations are ad-free. The song selections—and even the DJs’ soothing, oboe-like voices—make fine background music. Only potential risk: the occasional random appearance of Mannheim Steamroller.
If you’re in the mood for something louder, tune in your local “alternative rock” college station. Another fine, commercial-free choice—assuming you’ve done your research and know tonight’s DJ isn’t going to follow every song with a half hour of impenetrable inside jokes about her dorm mates.
2. Turntable (a.k.a. Phonograph, Record Player, Turny Thing Which Plays Those Huge Black CDs)
Yes, we know, vinyl record collecting has become an expensive7 and insufferable hobby for rich hipsters. But that’s one of the appeals of picking a turntable as your musical method of choice: neutralizing the scorn of any rich hipsters you may have invited. Indeed, play your cards just right and they may spend the entire evening thumbing through your records and providing you with free DJ services.8
More importantly (and practically), though, turntables are the ideal tool for pacing a dinner party. This is because, like fires, they must be constantly tended. Every twenty minutes or so—the average running time of a vinyl side—you will be given an opportunity to recalibrate the mood of the evening. Is everyone getting a little too worked up about the president’s latest tweet? Oops, that Iron Maiden record just ended; time for some show tunes! Okay, now what were we discussing again? Something about the theater, wasn’t it?
COMMON PARTY MUSIC FOULS 
THE MULTIPLE-FORMAT MISTAKE
Pick a format and stick to it for at least an hour at a time. Constantly skipping from record player to CD player to digital streaming can result in songs being halted midplay—ruining the vibe and, possibly, conversation.
MUSICAL COMMUNALISM
The ideal dinner party is a musical dictatorship. That musical dictator is YOU, unless you bequeath this power to ONE guest of your choosing. Be vigilant! Otherwise you’ll find your stereo hijacked over and over by guests who insist that everybody just has to hear this one song. It will never be just one song. It will always be several songs. And your guests will not be selecting them for the good of the party—they will be selecting them for themselves.
THE TELEVISION TRAP
If your music setup requires you to select or play tunes through your TV monitor, figure out a different setup. A TV set displaying a playlist and album art is as distracting as anything else on a TV. Plus, you’ve introduced the temptation to use the TV set to play video. At which point your party is fucked.
1. Homemade Digital Playlist Played via Any Means Necessary
We can’t state it enough: The key difference between dinner parties and the Day-Killing Egg Meal That Shall Not Be Named is your personal touch. Just as the food you serve reflects your personality, so does the music you play. So while the above musical methods are totally serviceable (and take way less time to prep), the most accurate way to musically represent yourself is to compile a playlist of your favorite songs. Plus, unlike a vinyl record, a playlist can be hours and hours long. And unlike a radio DJ’s set, a homemade soufflé, or your friend Ali’s endless stories about her kid, a playlist is always perfect. Because it came from you.
STEP 2: PREPARING YOUR PLAYLIST
Some of our best friends are musicians, but even they’ll tell you musicians often make for lousy interviews. Maybe because they’re exhausted from touring. Maybe because they can’t hear our questions, after spending years battered by tidal waves of guitar distortion. Most likely it’s because answering questions with earnest insight doesn’t tend to boost your rock star cred. In any case, to combat the problem, we created a segment called the Dinner Party Soundtrack. Wherein we ask musicians to list a few tunes they’d play at a party. Because even if they won’t deign to explain why they rhymed “Girl I love you” with “Squirrels gonna mug you,” they’re usually psyched to talk about a few songs they’ve been digging.
Anyway, a happy side benefit of putting this part of the show together has been learning, over time, that for most people, dinner parties unfold in three distinct phases, each demanding a certain vibe of music. Structure your playlist with these phases in mind—about forty-five minutes’ worth of songs each—and you’ll be the boss of bossa nova, the soul of soul, the… unk of funk? Whatever. You’ll be golden.
Phase One: The Welcome
Everyone’s arriving. Hugs, handshakes, and/or air-kisses. Guests who’ve never met greet each other with delighted, squeaky-high voices, as they wait for the first glass of booze to take effect and make socializing way easier.
Our own rule of thumb is to score this phase of the party with music that’s upbeat and not too wordy, to facilitate conversation and sweeten the sound of glasses clinking. Our guests don’t always agree.
“Distant Lover”—Marvin Gaye
“It’s a pretty sexy song. I think that would be a nice mood-setting song. Y’know, people walking in the door are like, ‘Aaaall right! It’s gonna be this kinda party.’”
—KEVIN BARNES, OF MONTREAL
“Cold Turkey”—John Lennon
“When we first get to this party, the song that’s going to be playing is ‘Cold Turkey’ by John Lennon. I chose this track to be a little witty—add a little food humor to the mix. And then also I want to keep my guests educated on the perils of food storage. The typical interpretation of this song is that it’s about heroin withdrawal, but I’ve heard that it is actually inspired by a time when John Lennon got food poisoning from actual cold turkey, and he intentionally wrote it so that it could be interpreted as heroin withdrawal instead.”
—WILL TOLEDO, A.K.A. CAR SEAT HEADREST
“No Sleep till Brooklyn”—The Beastie Boys
“I’ve been living in Brooklyn for nearly twenty years now. It’s definitely home at this point. So, the first song of my dinner party will be ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn.’ I mean, just the hook—who comes up with that, you know what I mean? And the way they yell it at you: ‘BROOKLYYYYN!’”
—SANTIGOLD
“Rumble”—Link Wray
“It just has this sort of really menacing feel to it, like something stormy just walked through the door.”
—DANIEL KESSLER, INTERPOL
“Island Ridin’”—The So So Glos
“I wanna get the guests pumped at this party. So we’re gonna start on an upbeat note while all the finger foods are getting passed around. Maybe some people will even dance, you know? With those crab rolls in their hands.”
—CONOR OBERST
Phase Two: Dinner
With some cocktails in their veins, everyone is now best friends, and you all sit down to dinner. We figure this is the perfect time to drop in a song that might itself become the subject of dinner conversation (see blues rocker Benjamin Booker’s pick, below). But a lot of musicians have told us this might also be an appropriate time for screaming high-octane rock. We figure that’s because they’re used to eating dinner in their dressing room while an opening act sound-checks just down the hall at stun volume. But maybe that’s how you want to feel, too.
“Long Tall Sally”—Little Richard
“I’m hoping that by now, especially if it’s winter, we would be having some Chianti Classico… and so I think I would go with ‘Long Tall Sally’ by Little Richard. I mean, Chianti Classico—you gotta get the right one—it’s a lovely light Italian wine, and it’s something you can drink in quite large quantities. And I would like to feel everyone’s feeling fairly loose and ready for a good ol’ knees-up.”
—COLIN BLUNSTONE, THE ZOMBIES
“New Noise”—Refused
“So now, at this point [in the party], everyone’s turnt up… It’s just raucous, everyone’s just bouncing off each other. It’s almost like when you’re at a rally and everyone’s together, in unison, saying the same thing. That kind of energy. But it’s a fun energy.”
—DJ STEVE AOKI
“Smooth”—Santana feat. Rob Thomas
“Everyone knows it, and, really, everyone loves it. I think it’s kind of an icebreaker, where someone hears it playing and they go, Oh! ‘Smooth’! And then people sing along or just start talking about it… Also, my name in Japanese means ‘ocean moon,’ and there’s a line in that song that says, ‘Just like the ocean under the moon.’ So I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s me! That’s me!’”
——MITSKI
“Brazil”—Les Paul
“I imagine this song being around a salad course at a dinner party. What makes me think of a salad course is there’s these crazy little really high-pitched kind of guitar ‘stabs’ in this song. It reminds me of when you’re eating a salad, you’ve got a fork, and you’re stabbing at a little renegade cherry tomato all over the plate and can’t get it.”
—NICK KRILL, THE SPINTO BAND
“I love eating to jazz. There’s just something about it. It’s deep and rich.
“And it’s very, very good for the digestive system. Your organs are like a musical band. And when you’ve got the combination of good company, good music, and good food… ohhh, that band can play.
“I’ve heard this song my entire life. It’s been places. It’s shot heroin. It’s failed. But then it recovered. It’s kind of like a survivor. Which is something I can relate to.”
—XAVIER DPHREPAULEZZ, A.K.A. FANTASTIC NEGRITO
“Any Other Way”—Jackie Shane
“It’s good background music, you know: soft, but also entertaining. People might stop eating for a second and be like, ‘Oh, what is this?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s Jackie Shane.’
“Jackie Shane is an R & B singer from Toronto, who used to wear women’s clothing and dress up. Like, this black soul singer cross-dressing guy. And it’s the most incredible stuff that you’ve ever heard. I don’t think people know very much about this guy, and that’s what makes it so crazy. It’s like, what was happening in Toronto that you have this guy who’s doing stuff that’s completely taboo, in the early sixties? Where does he come from? I don’t know—you tell me. You tell me!”
—BENJAMIN BOOKER
Phase Three: Dancing/Lounging
Dinner done, the evening can conclude in one of two ways: with a bang or with a (contented food coma) whimper. In the case of the former, you need music that can fuel dancing, increasingly hysterical laughter, or the sound of your bookcase collapsing ’cause your tipsy friend stumbled into it. In the case of the latter, you seek music that might lead your guests to fall happily asleep midsentence. Either way, apparently, it is the ideal time to play David Bowie.
“Changes”—David Bowie
“I was thinking, you know, maybe the food is done, maybe we’re going to move to a different room. So I think that having this song, ‘Changes,’ would actually provide a good segue into a change: change of scene for the party.”
—CORIN TUCKER, SLEATER-KINNEY
“Magic Dance”—David Bowie, from the Labyrinth soundtrack
“‘Magic Dance’ is the weirdest song ever made by anyone that’s ever made music. You see who knows this song. You judge ’em off of that. If they don’t know it, and they’ve never seen Labyrinth, you’re probably not inviting them [to a party] next year. You put it on, you get a Soul Train line going.”
—MACKLEMORE
“Crazy”—Seal
“It’s mellow enough to where, if you guys want to two-step and shake your shoulders to it? That’s cool. If you also want to run and jump through your neighbor’s windowpane naked? Totally goes with both of those.”
—THUNDERCAT
“I Have Walked This Body”—Susanna and Jenny Hval
“The first line is, ‘I have walked this body to the rim of its end.’ It sounds like somebody maxing out their body until they physically just leave it. If I was having a dinner party… eventually I would want to get real occulty, you know what I mean? Like, we’re all there around a table; we might as well do some kind of ritual, or have some kind of out-of-body experience.”
—MIKE HADREAS, A.K.A. PERFUME GENIUS
“Guilty”—Al Bowlly, 1930s jazz singer
“Al has this way of crooning—this high tenor that lilts and floats… It blends in well, you can mingle and talk… And for whatever reason, it’s a very warm and welcoming sound, hearing music that could’ve been played on a very, very old record player. On a gramophone, even.”
—JOY WILLIAMS, THE CIVIL WARS
“River”—Joni Mitchell
“Her vocals on this are particularly melancholy… It’s kind of taking the party down to a more pensive place. This would be, like, around the time that you’d be having a really heartfelt conversation with a family member or a friend.”
—ZOOEY DESCHANEL, SHE AND HIM
“Happiness Togetherness”—disco soul ballad by Heatwave
“This is the part of the evening that we might make a fire in the fireplace, and then invite anyone who’s too drunk to drive to crash on the couch.”
—CAROLINE POLACHEK, CHAIRLIFT
THE UNIVERSAL PLAYLIST
Note that in a pinch, the following types of music will work in all situations, during any phase of a dinner party:
a) INSTRUMENTALS. Jazz, classical, surf rock, Caribbean steel drums, hip-hop remixes, Herb Alpert’s faux-Mexican lounge pop, minimalist hotel lobby electronica. They’re all fine because there are no words to clash with—or distract from—your conversation. Exception: Bagpipe music. Do not play ever.
b) MUSIC IN A LANGUAGE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. Portuguese bossa nova tunes, Korean pop, Gaelic sea shanties. Even—if you don’t speak English—Taylor Swift. This is one part of the party where not understanding what someone’s saying is a good thing. Foreign language songs provide the comfort of a human voice, sans the distraction of comprehensible lyrics. They also subconsciously transport guests back to infancy, when words were just a soothing hum in the background as they awaited the original dinner party: mother’s breast.
c) TONY BENNETT. There exist Michael Jackson haters. Even Sinatra tunes can divide a room. But no one hates Tony Bennett. We do not know why. Indeed, we urge Tony Bennett to leave his body to science so that we might one day discern the secret and use it to end war.
PART 3: PREPARING THE APPETIZERS
You may feel that appetizer wisdom belongs in the chapter about food. But in fact the second thing a guest should encounter upon walking through your door10 is something to nosh on. So by definition, you better have it ready before they walk through your door.
Appetizers are the preventative care of a dinner party. A sensible guest will not have eaten for hours. They will arrive not only hungry but with their stomachs unlined—and therefore unfortified against the onslaught of booze to come. Left unfed, this person could have one martini and promptly become drunk, nauseous, and prone to looking up exes on Facebook. Get an appetizer in them, quickly.
The good news? Appetizers do not have to be fancy or expensive. Yes, you can get pricey olives in varying degrees of size, color, and salinity from an upscale Italian specialty store. But you can also get a couple of jars of those Spanish deals they sell cheap at Trader Joe’s. Olives are mainly delivery vessels for salt. As long as the olives are salty, only the snobbiest guest will express dissatisfaction.
Ditto cheese. A special ornate cheese board laden with ten types of rare hunks from all corners of the world? That is certainly impressive and will be appreciated. But equally appreciated is a dinner plate with a block of cheddar from the supermarket down the street. Cheese is a fat delivery system. People like fats. Just get some out there. And crackers, guys. There are never enough crackers.
TEGAN: You’re the person whose house I don’t go to for dinner parties because I’m like, “They’re just not good at it. I’m too hungry. I always have to go to McDonald’s on the way home!”
SARA: Oh my God, what a diva! Don’t worry, I’ll have lots of almonds for you, Tegan.
—TEGAN AND SARA
And that’s pretty much all you need, appetizer-wise: something salty and something fatty. Fatty cheese and salty olives. Fatty hummus and salty pita chips. Fatty seven-layer bean dip and the salty tears of self-loathing that come after downing a quart of it. Remove the items from any packaging, steer your guests to them, and you’re done.
Of course, if you want to expend time and/or money on more elaborate starters, you’re welcome to do so. Here are two of our personal standby recipes. Both are cheap, both are pretty easy, both have been deemed excellent by our friends or after years of peer-reviewed laboratory testing—whichever seems more plausible to you.
Brendan’s Stuffed Fried Olives
One of a long line of European peasant dishes which Americans mistakenly think is fancy, this recipe comes courtesy of my longtime friend and cooking sensei Jolynn Deloach. As soon as Jolynn’s party guests arrive, she puts them to work making these.12 This isn’t as hard to prepare as it sounds, and the work is offset by the fact that it is undoubtedly THE GREATEST THING YOU WILL EVER EAT IN YOUR LIFE.
Combine the meat with the tomato sauce and gently simmer until tender, around fifteen minutes. Be careful not to overcook it. When cool, shred or chop the meat finely. If you use a food processor, take care not to overmix—you want some texture.
Mix the rest of the filling ingredients together with the shredded meat. Form walnut-size balls of filling.
With a sharp knife, remove the flesh from the olive pits in one long spiral. (This is a lot easier with pre-pitted olives!)
Wrap the “corkscrew” of olive flesh around a ball of filling. Don’t worry if it breaks; just patch it together around the filling.
Dredge each filled olive in flour, egg, and bread crumbs in preparation for frying.
Deep-fry at 350 degrees until golden brown and drain on brown paper or paper towels.
If the sheer boxer brief–dropping calorie count of these golden orbs has you worried your guests might quickly become as stuffed as the olives themselves, simply limit the number you make. But honestly, you’re all adults: it’s okay if people spoil their dinner. Besides, you can always eat them like savory bonbons the next day, while you stream old episodes of 30 Rock and make an appointment with your cardiologist.
Rico’s Peperonata
This Italian specialty is something between a sauce and a stew, which you spoon onto hunks of crusty bread and eat the hell out of. Basically, what you’re doing is turning healthy vegetables into sweet-and-sour olive-oily candy. By the way, I got this recipe from my actual Italian friend Francesco Malcangi, while I was visiting him in actual Italy, so you can tell everyone it’s “authentic.”
Slice the peppers into thin strips. Chop the onion coarsely. Slice the celery widthwise into thin crescents. Chop up the tomato coarsely. All this slicing and chopping is a pain in the ass, but once it’s done the rest goes quickly.
Add the olive oil to a deep saucepan over medium heat. Throw in the celery and peppers, sprinkle liberally with salt, and stir thoroughly till the veggies are coated. Cook them down a bit, stirring occasionally, until they are slightly softened. Then throw in the onion and tomatoes and a little more salt. Cook for ten to fifteen minutes more, stirring occasionally. Now you want the peppers to be getting very soft and floppy.
Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar and vinegar. Taste. Add more salt, vinegar, and sugar as needed.
Put back on the heat and turn it up high—you’re now boiling off any remaining water left in the veggies and making sure they’re all soft; you don’t want anything crunchy in there.
Refrigerate overnight (or as long as you can before the party) to get the flavors to meld as much as possible. Serve with crusty bread. Also goes great mixed into scrambled eggs the next morning. You’re welcome.