dinner party

So the other night, Ceej and I were going to have Provençal Cornish game hens for dinner. It would have been chicken from the get-go, but my oven tends to make whole roasted chicken into a horrible, bloody, dry-on-top, raw-on-the-bottom mess. Cornish game hens are more our speed. So I called Ceej and told him to pick up the following, which you will also need for your impromptu dinner party:

Poultry (details in a minute)
A pound of plum tomatoes; it's OK if they're pink and sad, because they will be roasted, and roasting tends to bring out the best in all tomatoes, pink or not
Leeks, a couple
Herbes de Provence (a blend of dried rosemary, marjoram, basil, bay leaf, thyme, and sometimes lavender; available in bulk at your local gourmet grocery)
Olives -- I told Ceej that Niçoise olives were preferable, but Kalamatas were cheaper. He bought the Niçoise anyway. I love that guy.)
Bread, preferably a rustic French loaf
White wine

We already had, as should you:
Garlic
Canned tomatoes
Olive oil
Parsley
Salt and pepper

Anyway, that afternoon my friend Christian was supposed to come over to hang out and ponder the imponderables, preferably with beer. Shortly after I got off the phone with Ceej, Christian called and asked if he could bring his friend Callie, who I like a lot. They showed up with two six-packs of Blue Moon Belgian white. I wasn't too stressed about dinner yet, thinking that they'd just be around long enough for a beer and a jaw. But the afternoon wore on, my guests were looking hungry, and I began worrying about having enough food for everyone -- Cornish hens, the previously-specified poultry, are kind of meager.

Afternoon bled into evening. Much beer was consumed. Callie called her boyfriend Jason, and we accidentally left a message on Jason's iPhone, featuring all of us talking about how awesome Jason is, and what a sexy beast he is (and it's true), and how Callie is very lucky because Jason was only supposed to be a rebound. It isn't often that I get to witness a moment in someone's life that they will spontaneously remember forty years from now and want to sink straight through the floor, but I did then, let me tell you. We wondered what the fuck we should do, and the idea that Jason should be invited to dinner to make up for the excruciating accidental message was floated.

I said fine, of course; after all it was I who was clearly audible on the message, drunkenly shouting "AND TO THINK, HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A REBOUND! HA HA!" But now I was REALLY stressing out about having enough food for everyone, because not only did we suddenly have five for dinner instead of two, but three of the pertinent parties were giant, strapping men who like to eat Brazil.

THANK GOD Ceej called right then. The grocery store only had sad, watery, hormone-y Tyson Cornish hens. I said "Oh good. Look. Scrap the Cornish hens. Go to the meat counter and buy the biggest organic bird they've got. Have the guy at the butcher counter French it into eight pieces. We've never tried to roast a cut-up chicken in our oven before, but there's a first time for everything."

Ceej said OK.

"And we need more wine," I said.

Ceej came home, bearing groceries. I started a prophylactic batch of brown rice, poured Chardonnay all around, and made the marinade, as follows:

Microscopically mince a clove of garlic and mix with a tablespoon of herbes de Provence, some S&P and a healthy amount of extra-virgin
Allow to macerate for as long as it takes you to get through another beer and several ribald anecdotes about all the parties present
Smear marinade all over cut-up bird and let sit until Jason shows up

Upon Jason's arrival, we had many pairs of hands at the ready. We all sprang into action, a well-oiled (and well-lubricated) machine, and here's how you and your guests would do it:

Preheat oven to 425
Core, seed and slice the tomatoes
Supplement them with some canned tomatoes, squooshed up
Chop up the white and light green parts of the leeks, and rinse them very well in a bowl of water (a good task for the entertainingly loquacious but not culinarily inclined)
Bash the pits out of the olives
Peel and slice about four, five more cloves of garlic
Toss all of the above together with some more olive oil and S&P
Spread mixture in a roasting pan; if your roasting pan is not big enough to accommodate both veg and chicken (likely) distribute veg between two pans
Douse mixture with a couple glugs of white wine
Arrange marinated chicken pieces on top
Put in oven
Pray that this will turn out OK, because what you have on your hands is a genuine Dinner Party, and you never make anything for Dinner Parties except food you can crank out under general anesthesia, and this chicken is a total, total experiment.

I drowned my anxiety in more wine. My starving guests (and husband) did the same. We talked about pretty much everything: Christian's crisis of spirit that came with turning thirty, Callie and Jason's plans to move in together and whether that was a good idea, Ceej's and my marriage and how it seems to be working out for us, the emotionally wrenching nature of the race for the Democratic Party nomination, and oh yeah, our fire-breathing armadillo art car project. And presently the most heavenly aroma began to waft from the kitchen -- chicken fat and olives, lavender and thyme. It smelled like summertime in Nice in there. I began to think that it would be OK after all.

You:

Roast chicken until internal temperature reaches 160 on an instant-read thermometer. In our oven this took exactly 45 minutes.
Have someone cut up the bread.
Have someone else plate the food: emergency brown rice on the bottom, roasted vegetable goosh on top, chicken pieces on top of that (the eight-piece French cut you had the meat-counter guy do means that everyone gets light or dark, whatever they like).
Strew everything with chopped parsley.

We ate this in near-total silence, punctuated only with occasional slurping of wine and faint moaning. All the vegetable goosh disappeared, as did the rice, as did the delicious artisan levain Ceej bought, as did the chicken, with the exception of one sad, bristly wing joint which we gave to the grateful cats. Then we all sat around, grinning to ourselves and basking in the joy of Unexpected Dinner Party, and discreetly wiping our greasy fingers on the sofa. Then Ceej played guitar and sang some songs, to thunderous applause, and everyone reluctantly dispersed, a little wobbly but none the worse for wear, warm with friends and Chardonnay and good old-fashioned schmaltz.

It would probably be delicious with some fennel too.