Christaan Felber for The New York Times
The table is set for a holiday meal prepared by the food writers Mark Bittman and Sam Sifton. More Photos »
Last month, Sam Sifton and I took up the job of cooking for 15 people at a friend's home in Brooklyn. The idea was to feed and impress friends, family members and colleagues without driving ourselves nuts. It's possible. And to do so, we decided not to spend more than eight hours obsessing over, shopping for and preparing the meal. We bought all our ingredients in the morning and then cooked through the afternoon. Dinner was called for 6 p.m.
There's a simple logic in putting together a big holiday feast. You want variety — even vegans are pretty easily satisfied by real bounty — but you don't want to cook individual meals for each person. A couple of easy decisions at the beginning start a cascade of choices that generate a menu. We wanted a high-low meal: a beautiful yet manageable dinner bookended by an impressive starter and an eye-popping dessert. In order to pull this off, though, we first had to decide on a main course, a meat dish. After rejecting pork (too obvious), beef and lamb (too expensive), we settled on chicken. We were near Sahadi's, the Middle Eastern market on Atlantic Avenue, so Sam resolved that the chickens would be roasted with preserved lemons. Golden and crusty, with a zing from the salty, acidic taste of the lemons, they would be a perfect bridge from our opulent appetizer into our decadent dessert. For sides, we settled on pilaf, a salad and roasted root vegetables, which are as seasonal as it gets this time of year.
This made fish an obvious choice for the starter. Lobster — sustainable, fancy, local — made sense. We planned to serve it cold with spicy mayonnaise, but that sauce was eventually altered thanks to some brainstorming in the kitchen. To finish the meal, I suggested a cake of orange, almond and olive oil. That didn't seem quite glamorous enough, so we decided to add pears poached in port. The pairing, it turned out, was far superior to the cheese course with which we topped off the meal.
As you can see from the timeline of our day, a couple of things changed during the course of the day. Besides the lobster sauce, Sam fell in love with some huge Spanish onions and decided to produce soubise, a more substantial rice dish. In the end, though, our decisions — the ones we planned, the ones we didn't — worked out, and the night ended with a clean kitchen.
Recipes:
Chicken Liver on Toast | Boiled Lobster With Lobster Mayonnaise | Chopped Salad With Herbs | Soubise | Roasted Root Vegetables | Roasted Chicken With Preserved Lemons | Poached Pears | Almond Cake
Mark Bittman is the magazine's lead food writer. Sam Sifton is national editor of The Times.
Editor: Jon Kelly
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