Recipes for Disaster by Tess Rafferty (Excerpt)

Recipes for

Disaster

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd i

9/7/12 3:12 PM

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd ii

9/7/12 3:12 PM

Recipes for

Disaster A Memoir

Tess Rafferty Thomas Dunne Books

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd iii

St. Martin’s Press New York

9/7/12 3:12 PM

I like to drink. The events in this memoir happened as written to the best of my memory, but as they all involve alcohol, one or two details might be off. If you’re reading this book thinking, “That didn’t happen that way! I was there!” well then, may I remind you that you were probably drinking, too. Also, some of the names and identifying characteristics have been changed so as to protect the privacy of those involved and not cause further issues at my next dinner party.

thomas dunne books.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press. recipes for disaster. Copyright © 2012 by Tess Rafferty. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.thomasdunnebooks.com www.stmartins.com Design by Anna Gorovoy Rafferty, Tess.

Recipes for disaster : a memoir / by Tess Rafferty.—1st ed. p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-250-01143-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-250-01834-2 (e-book) 1. Dinners and dining. 2. Dinners and dining—Humor. 3. Entertaining.

4. Entertaining—Humor. 5. Cooking. 6. Cooking—Humor. 7. Rafferty, Tess. I. Title.

TX737.R244 2012 642—dc23 2012033164 First Edition: November 2012 10

9

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd iv

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

9/7/12 3:12 PM

To my grandparents, Mike and Mary Rose, who first introduced me to the idea that good food could be enjoyed in the midst of great drama.

To Frank and Knoxie, who helped to develop my love of sharing good meals.

And to Chris, who gives me someone to share these meals— and my life—with.

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd v

9/7/12 3:12 PM

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd vi

9/7/12 3:12 PM

Contents

1.

Acknowledgments Prologue

xi 1

How to Cook a Turkey, or The Stomach: Not the Way to a Man’s Pants

7

Recipe

2.

Roasting a Turkey: So Not the Drama Your Mother Made It Look Like

29

How to Have an Elegant Dinner Party with No Furniture

35

Recipe Apple Pie: Because Store-Bought Is for People Who Don’t Love Their Boyfriends

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd vii

55

9/7/12 3:12 PM

viii

3.

Contents How to Enjoy a Good Meal with Friends

61

Recipe

4.

Knoxie’s Cookies: For Someone Whose Appetite for Food Is as Big as Their Appetite for Life

77

How to Throw an Impromptu Dinner Party for 7 at 1 a.m.

81

Recipe

5.

The Boyfriend’s Chili: The Colonic You Can Drink With

95

How to Count Your Blessings

99

Recipe

6.

Molasses Cinnamon Bread: It’s What’s for Breakfast If You’re Not Vomiting

111

How to Have a Fun Christmas Party for Adults & Children, and Even the Hosts (Yes, That Means You)

113

Recipe Sugar Cookies & Frosting: Minutes of Entertainment for Hyperactive Children

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd viii

129

9/7/12 3:12 PM

Contents

7.

8.

ix

How to Serve a Specialty Drink with an Iron Fist

133

How to Throw a Baby Shower for 100 People and Not Hate Babies or People

149

Recipe

9.

10.

How to Set Up a Bar for 100 People and Not Have 74 Bottles of Snapple Left Over

167

How to Carry a Theme Too Far

171

How to Learn to Love Yourself Again After Serving Runny Polenta

183

Recipe

11.

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd ix

Braised Short Ribs over Polenta: All of the Flavor Without the Self-Hate

201

How to Pair Wine with Food and Which Medical Weed to Never Mix with Entertaining

205

9/7/12 3:12 PM

x

12.

Contents How to Cook Without Cooking

219

Recipe

13.

Setting Up a Grilled-Cheese Station: How to Make Your Guests Cook Their Own Food

233

How to Cook a Gluten-Free Vegetarian Dinner with No Lactose or Fruits or Vegetables or Nuts

237

Recipe

14.

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd x

Braised Lamb Shank: Not for the Gluten-Free

255

How to Throw a Dinner Party for 2 and Save Your Relationship

259

Epilogue: How to Have a Wedding Dinner for 12

267

9/7/12 3:12 PM

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to so many people who helped make this book a reality, in ways both direct and indirect. First of all, to my agent Holly Root, who always believed in my writing and was an endless source of help and handholding as we honed this idea and made it work. And to my lawyer, Chad Christopher, who brought Holly into my life when I said I needed a book agent.

To The Soup writing staff, Lee Farber, Nic DeLeo, Andrew Genser, Greg Fideler, Darren Belitsky, and Jonah Ray who endured more than one writers’ dinner at my house and to our chief, K.P. Anderson who was always understanding and gave me the time to work on this when I needed to write.

And to the world’s best clip show jockey, Joel McHale, for his enthusiastic support of this project.

To Christy Stratton Mann and Alex Alexander who participated in the Girls’ Cooking Club experiments, which first gave me the idea that I might have something to say about entertaining.

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd xi

9/7/12 3:12 PM

xii

Acknowledgments

To Matthew Taylor for drawing the awesome Flaming Weenie Tree.

To my talented friends who orchestrated an amazing cover shoot when I called them in a panic: art director Gary Kordan, photographer Justine Ungaro, and makeup artist David Marvel.

To everyone who provided early support for this book: Cathryn Michon, Adena Halpern, Deborah Vankin, and Whitney Cummings.

To all of my agents at Paradigm: Doug Fronk, Chris Licata, Jana Marimpietri, Shawn Scallon, and Ida Ziniti, as well as to Johnathan Berry at 3 Arts, for all of their enthusiasm for this project.

And to my father, who taught me how to make veal paprikash, and my mother, who was never much of a cook, but was a voracious reader and always let me read at the dinner table, thus instilling the other passion necessary in the writing of this book.

And of course, warmest thanks to Chris McGuire, who selflessly lets his life be turned upside down whenever I get one of my bright ideas. Thank you for doing the dishes, cooking breakfast, and getting the cat off my papers while I completed the edits, Sweetie!

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd xii

9/7/12 3:12 PM

The meals . . . were designed to prolong our time together; the food was of course meant to nourish us, but it was also meant to satisfy, in some deeper way, our endless hunger for one another. —Passion on the Vine by Sergio Esposito

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd xiii

9/7/12 3:12 PM

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd xiv

9/7/12 3:12 PM

Recipes for

Disaster

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd xv

9/7/12 3:12 PM

053-50936_ch00_4P.indd xvi

9/7/12 3:12 PM

Prologue

“I am an onion,” I think to myself.

It sounds like one of those bullshit acting exercises I once paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to do instead of learning how to actually act. But instead of taking me back to a time when I was told that character could be achieved if I just learned how to effectively breathe out of my rectum, I think it again. “I am an onion.”

Maybe I should start at the beginning. In the beginning there was no onion. In the beginning there was only the question: “Why am I doing this?”

This is what I’m thinking as I crush up fresh basil and mint to flavor pitchers of water for that evening’s dinner. I am cooking dinner for twelve people: one person can’t eat gluten, two people are lactose intolerant, one woman only eats chicken and fish, and another I have just found out is vegetarian, despite the fact that I served her boeuf bourguignon in my house just six months ago. Also, my throat closes

053-50936_ch01_4P.indd 1

9/7/12 3:17 PM

2

Tess Rafferty

if I have any fruit and many vegetables, but this is at least a challenge I am used to.

“Seriously,” I ask myself, “why do I do this?”

It is not a resentful question. I am not angry at a lack of appreciation I have projected onto guests who haven’t even arrived yet, nor do I feel stressed out and rushed. I am neither of those things as I have learned through endless trials and miserable errors the secrets to serving a hot meal while making sure that things don’t get so stressful that I melt down. At least I think I have. As the night will prove, sometimes no matter how calm you remain, twelve iPhones in a room will interfere with your boyfriend’s wireless sound system and somehow your night will end with a fight and tears at two in the morning.

But I am getting ahead of myself. At this moment in time I do not know that I will be sleeping in the spare room tonight and I have allowed the entire day to prepare for this dinner party. Which again makes me ask, “Why? Why does it seem perfectly reasonable to me to spend an entire day two weeks before Christmas working on a dinner that is not even the last one I will be cooking this season? Why am I flavoring water, when most people don’t even care about the wine we’re drinking?”

The question is detached from all emotion. I am generally curious about what makes me do this, like I am my own science experiment. And the only answer I can come up with is, “I guess I must like it.”

When I think back on it, I have wanted to throw dinner parties since I was in high school. The night the fall play opened junior year, I thought it would be fun to have a select group of the cast over for dinner before our call time. We

053-50936_ch01_4P.indd 2

9/7/12 3:17 PM

Recipes for Disaster

3

made fettuccine Alfredo because My On-Again Off-Again Boyfriend (aka Future Gay Best Friend) said he wanted to eat pasta to give him more energy during the show, like it was a marathon and not You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Looking back, it seems really odd that my instinct as a rebellious Goth teen was to suddenly get all Martha Stewart rather than go drink in a parking lot somewhere; however, it’s prescient of a comment The Boyfriend made just a few years ago, “You’d rather throw a dinner party than work on your career.”

That is not true—entirely. I think I throw dinner parties so that I can work on my career without putting a gun in my mouth. I’d much rather put fresh pasta and a Brunello in there. (Hmmm . . . I’m getting notes of gunpowder and desperation.) More importantly, cooking a meal and entertaining is a project that has a physical outcome that you can see and taste and touch. Working on your career is a project that has no beginning, middle, or end and, often, no outcome. But setting a table is a creative endeavor that has to live up to no one’s expectations but my own. I don’t get “notes” on where I placed the silverware or told that my flower arrangement appeals to the wrong demographic. Preparing food is a meditation. And I get to make something delicious the way I want to make it, and as long as I follow some simple steps it will all turn out perfectly.

OK, sometimes the food sucks. Sometimes no matter how many times you’ve made it before, some weird atmospheric condition occurs or maybe you just weren’t paying attention to how much salt you used and the whole thing blows up in your face and you have to serve someone beef that never tenderized or maybe a runny polenta. And it’s the

053-50936_ch01_4P.indd 3

9/7/12 3:17 PM

4

Tess Rafferty

worst kind of rejection because every other kind of rejection is subjective; just because someone didn’t like your screenplay doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. But when you don’t like your own food, there’s no shrugging it off with “that person’s a hack who hasn’t produced a hit ever.” I am not a hack and as far as dinner has gone, I’ve produced many hits.

And what’s worse—you have to still eat it.

Cookbooks should have a whole chapter on dealing with disappointment. Or they should be written by actors and writers because we deal with disappointment every day.

And as much as feeling disappointment pains you, it’s probably the flip side of what allows you to enjoy your creation so much. Cooks who don’t feel disappointment probably don’t realize when their food is bad so they probably don’t feel exhilarated when it’s good, either.

So maybe the question isn’t, “Why do I do this?” but “Why do I like it?” Why do I love something that is so much work, that doesn’t make me money, but rather often costs me hundreds of dollars in things like truffle honey and Le Creuset pots, and that can often end in disappointment? Food is about celebrating the present. When you’re eating good food, you’re totally in the moment, experiencing all the flavors of both the food and the company in front of you. When you use your good dishes and set a gorgeous table, you’re really saying, “This moment is going to be beautiful because it’s the only one there is.” I am not going to focus on the fact that the flowers will die tomorrow or tell myself the china is only for special occasions, because today is a special occasion and we never know when we might go the way of the flowers.

Recently, I was cutting an onion and I noticed that the grain of the onion—the lines that run from stem to stem—

053-50936_ch01_4P.indd 4

9/7/12 3:17 PM

Recipes for Disaster

5

went sideways. On one side it started straight, but then it started listing to one side, like some graph of a complicated calculus problem that I never could grasp, but decided it didn’t matter because I was going to be an actress anyway. I couldn’t stop staring at the imperfection; it looked so cool.

It was so unusual. And that’s when I realized nature wasn’t perfect, either. Here I was trying to cook the perfect dinner, when even my ingredients weren’t perfect. They were interesting, to be sure, and different, but not perfect. And yet, that onion wasn’t beating itself up and feeling like a failure.

It was still an onion.

My dinners aren’t perfect. But they are interesting and unusual and different. And through it all I may have finally learned to be happy when my grain grows in another direction. I am still an onion.

053-50936_ch01_4P.indd 5

9/7/12 3:17 PM