I remember moving into my first and only, (thank god) solo apartment, which happened to be in Berlin, and googling, “How to stop feeling so lonely.”
“Invite people over,” popped up alongside some suicide hotlines I might like to try calling if it were really that bad.
Ironic, who am I going to invite over? I thought, I’m lonely, as in I have no friends, didn’t I just say that?
But I sent an invite out to the few people I knew at the time, and it went just fine. When they left, I still felt lonely, but I had had something to do all day and the buzzing of people’s bodies left a gentle hum in the air when they went. I slept a little easier than usual.
It was the first time I had hosted a dinner party by myself and it showed: 2 of my guests sat on my bed as if it were a bench, one was in an office chair, a throw blanket served as a tablecloth and the vegetable marinade was a packet of Italian Seasonings salad dressing powder. I made carrot soup that prompted several compliments. I tried to explain I was no cook and the unemulsified mush at the bottom of the bowls was the unfortunate result of pureéing by hand, not to worry!
It was a far cry from luxury. It wasn’t a solution, but it helped a little. I think we all just missed eating at a table with someone else.
When I got home to Los Angeles, I continued the dinner parties with Sunday night “Family Dinners” in which a rotating cast of about 5 friends came in and out as it suited them and their various schedules. I cooked most Sundays with my best friend Amy (cutie on the left), but sometimes my friend Stuart would make something tasty and host us at his place to give my poor roommates a break from dinner-party-zilla, aka ME.
Family dinners kept me hanging on by a thread as I started therapy and went through a rough break-up. I still miss the ritual of it—of opening my home to others, of sharing my budding home-cooking skills with people who didn’t really care that I was into cooking, but liked hanging out. I started baking for every club meeting I led (attendance skyrocketed) and trying to find even more ways to push my obsession onto others. I even hosted a “Spring Feast” with 10+ guests crammed into my apartment and a roast leg of lamb. There were courses and cocktails. It was a complete supper club. I’ve since scaled back in the spirit of the best dinner I have ever hosted. The menu featured pasta and bread and someone else brought the cheap wine.
The best dinner party was only possible because of the best recipe. Browsing the cookbook section at Powell Library had become a habit of mine. I usually did this to distract myself from a paper or a symbolic logic assignment, and I found some real gems. There, under the big windows of the reading room, I discovered Richard Olney and Tamar Adler and MFK Fisher.
This recipe, which I found in the very special anthology for those of us who cook for one, Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant, seemed like the perfect one for me. The author seemed like he was having fun and living life on the edge and surrounded by interesting, artistic friends. And this dinner party he describes, aside from the hash, sounded like a party I wanted to be at.
“One night, in one of our cheap, cold student flats, we organized a dinner for our Italian language class. Four or five of us took on cooking duties. This consisted of going shopping together, arriving at the apartment early, smoking massive amounts of hash using the famed “hot butter knife/cardboard toilet paper roll” method, and getting down to some brass fucking tacks cooking. Dante served as chef de cuisine, he being in command of the recipe. The response from our fellow students was pure rapture. As for our Italian teacher, Elisabetta, she either enjoyed salsa rosa or was too polite to say otherwise. She had the annoying habit of speaking exclusively Italian. Since it was early in the semester, we were picking up only about 30 percent of what she said anyway. I left that evening, drunk on the power of good cooking, and, of course, drunk on wine.
Here, a lesser writer might surrender to cheap hyperbole, and say something like, “Salsa rosa changed the very course of my life.”
Salsa rosa changed the very course of my life.”
This recipe is for one, but it can be increased 20x plus to suit your needs, it’s accompanied by a brilliant essay and snuggled amongst other brilliant essays. It is a mythical pasta sauce that screams luxury, safety, comfort, ease. In LA, I cooked the pasta in an instant pot, having run out of appropriate vessels, and it felt gummy on my teeth. But nobody cared. I served it alongside a garlic bread so decadent that it could have passed for panzanella and we all ate it standing up, slopping sauce on our T-shirts. I made two new friends that night and laughed more than I had in months.
Dinner parties saved me as I stared into an abyss. I find myself back at the abyss again: lonely, on the precipice of moving back to Berlin, grieving the loss of our pet, missing my friends who all decided to move to New York (WHY!?) and the woes of familial drama, so I cooked a dinner party for one the other night. I made Salsa Rosa again and it was just as delicious as I remembered, if only slightly less magical. The saucy noodles all tangled together in the bowl and holding each other closely reminded me of all the people stretched across the planet who I love and cannot feed tonight.
There are plenty of guides for how to host and what to do and what to cook (ignore them, it’s your kitchen, to hell with the rules).
My only rule has always been and will always be: everyone is always invited.
And, I can’t do much about it from where I am now, but truly if I could buy you all plane tickets from New York (you know who you are) and have you over for dinner tonight and next week and the week after that until we all die peacefully at the age of 102, I would.
Instead, I’m begging you all to do as I say and not as I do: invite some people over for something easy, peasy unbelievably good and everything you deserve in a pasta dish. If you have no one to invite over, know that I am dining in solidarity at my own table tonight, washing down my lonesome blues with cheese and butter.
Recipe for Salsa Rosa for One as written by Ben Karlin:
3 tablespoons olive oil
5 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
1 small zucchini, sliced (optional)
3 roma tomatoes, chopped
1 box Pomi diced tomatoes, around 20 ounces
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
? cup parmigiano cheese, grated
1 box panna (cooking cream), about 6 ounces, or half pint heavy cream
? pound dry pasta (spaghettini, cappellini, or any long thin noodle. Do not try with fusilli, penne, or farfalle or you will seriously be fucked)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Heat the olive oil in a medium sauce”
Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat.
Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until it just turns brown.
Add the zucchini and cook, stirring, until it has a yellowish sheen.
Add the fresh and boxed tomatoes. (Canned whole tomatoes will work too—just make sure there are some fresh ones in there.)
Lower the heat a bit and cook until all the tomatoes start breaking down and forming a sugo (sauce).
Now add the butter, cheese, and cream, but don’t add it in all at once.
Mix it in, so the sauce continues to cook and reduce down. You want to do at least three or four waves.
Once it’s all in, set the heat to low and cover.
Boil your water and cook your pasta al dente. Remember, it will finish cooking once it’s out of the boiling water, so don’t leave it in too long.
“After you strain the pasta, throw it back into the pot with a nice pour of extra-virgin olive oil.
Add some salt and pepper, then pour the salsa rosa over the pasta.
Mix, but not too roughly, just so it gets slithery with sauce.
Eat it.
Run a marathon the next day.
*Note: Never once have I run a marathon after eating this dish and I was just fine.