For the past four months, my home has been the meeting place of a weekly dinner party. The dining room becomes filled with close friends (sometimes too many), pots are filled with starchy pasta, and counters are covered in basil, garlic skins, and bottle upon bottle of wine. This may sound like a nightmare to some, but I love it.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve always loved big dinners with a lot of people around, talking loudly while passing the salt, and just generally enjoying each other’s company. Unfortunately for me, my family was always rather small, so this was a rare occurrence. Now that I have my own home, though, I try to have people over as often as I can. This kind of gathering brings together two of my most favourite things: food and good conversation.
In a time when being busy is glorified, iPhones are intimate confidants, and food is prepared quickly and eaten even quicker, there is something satisfying and rewarding about taking the time to sit down and eat, slowly. It doesn’t even matter if the food is particularly good (give me Chinese takeout, for all I care). What’s important is that your day — and the day of your real-life confidants — is slowed down a bit and you have a moment to genuinely connect, in person.
There is something rewarding about taking time to sit down and eat — slowly.
When my boyfriend and I first started inviting people over for dinner once a week, it was a small group, around four or five of us, all connected by a love of literature and art. This was what the group started out as: a place for us to share things we were working on, or just discuss things we’d read and seen. As the group expanded and changed, so did our conversations. It no longer mattered what the content was, it was the form we all grew attached to.
These nights soon brought out 11 or 12 of our friends, and we had to build an attachment for our table just to fit everyone shoulder to shoulder. One night, a large amount of pasta burned in the pot and I had to run out and buy more. Forgetting my keys, I was locked out of our apartment building, buzzing the front door continuously for 15 minutes (the buzzer goes to my boyfriend’s cell phone, which was on silent).
However, despite this mishap and others — namely involving several broken wine glasses — the evenings were a good opportunity to see friends and sit around a table and eat for hours.
Our Monday nights brought us together when normally, our busy lives would keep us from seeing anyone for weeks at a time. They were always set aside as the time to gather, and it was something we all looked forward to: starting out our weeks on a high note full of pasta, tomato sauce, and red wine.
Now that the semester has started again, and my boyfriend has started grad school, it’s harder for it to be a weekly occurrence, but we are still going to try to welcome people into our home every now and then for good food and company — for our souls and our bellies. Only this time, it’s going to be soup.
