Jared gets in today! I'm so excited. I will be picking him up from the airport around five-thirty, and then we will go out for a dinner at a nice Italian place in the (surprisingly close nearby) North End, followed by coming to BSCF. We should probably be there around eight o'clock and staying for the rest of the evening, for those of you who would like to see the boy while he's in town.
In housemate news, we now have a Jane at Elsinore! She got in around the middle of the day yesterday, and with her arrival, the place is now complete. I hope she is settling in comfortably, and enjoys living there with us. I'm glad to have her, and I'm also glad that things will finally be able to settle. It's looking like Elsinore's going to be a pretty fun place to be now.
Which brings me to the thought of how, especially lately, Elsinore has been a favorite hangout spot. This pleases me, because I love entertaining. One of the best things, in my opinion, about living at Elsinore is that there is the kitchen and living room space necessary to have people over to do things like hang out, have gaming gatherings, and my very favorite form of socialization, the dinner party.
Cooking has become a major hobby of mine as well as something I've gotten kind of good at, so it gives me a lot of job to be able to share it with the special people in my life. I very much have internalized the notion that food is love. By going to the time and effort to cook something delicious to serve to people I care about, I am showing the love I have for my guests and my desire to make them happy. I also love food as a social lubricant. Some of the best and most comfortable conversations I've had with large groups of people have happened over a dinner table sharing a tasty meal. It's so easy to connect with each other that way-- I suspect that it is because of this that so much of human ritual, ceremony, and celebration incorporates people eating together as a major aspect.
It also enormously helps my development as a cook. As much as I enjoy cooking for its own sake, like pretty much everyone I find it much more worthwhile to cook for a large group. It feels like a greater return on the effort. And I like the challenges it offers me as a menu planner. What meal can I design that will appeal to everyone's tastes, and satisfy the requirements of the vegetarians, the carnivores, the kosher people, all on the same plate? I like serving lots of different things to my guests, so it keeps me looking for new dishes to try in order to keep the menu interesting. And then I get external feedback. Are things cooked to your liking? Do the flavors of a given dish go well together? Do you find the various dishes I picked for the meal to be complementary? What did I do well, and what should I change for next time? I want to improve as a cook, so I am really interested in varied sources of feedback, and I certainly love talking about cookery and food, so the discussion is interesting as well as useful to me. And of course there's the validation factor-- I love getting compliments on what I serve! So basically having people over is a perfect combination of my favorite things, good food, good friends, and compliments. No wonder I love throwing parties!
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