So I guess if life is about balance, the perfect ying to the yang of an elaborate solo evening out is an equally elaborate dinner party at home with some of your closest friends.I never picked a country from the wine bag of fun this week. For starters, I wasn't home to do it. Life got busy, or at least busy enough for me to handle. I was too tired for menu planning.
By the end of my week some of my friends were floating ideas of getting together Saturday. I thought it would be fun to have them over and cook for them and wanted to make something dinner party friendly (ie: tried, true and delicious).
At some point Saturday morning I realized my sister was on her way for her first time for Greece. I knew there would be no better way to wish her bon voyage than by with some moussaka.
Greece also has special meaning for me. It was the first country I ever visited overseas when I was a 16 year-old-soon to be senior at Sacred Heart Academy in Buffalo. I was lucky enough to be in the group of about a dozen teenage girls and half as many nuns who spent roughly two weeks touring the ancient ruins and gorgeous islands in the Mediterranean.
Thus began a period in my life when I was doing a lot of traveling.
My friend Sarah and I have occasionally mused about whether Greece was really as amazing as we remember it, or if we were just young, naive and impressionable.
I know a lot of people who say they didn't take travel opportunities when they were younger because they wanted to wait until they had more money to enjoy the experience. For me, I am I happy I did. There's nothing like being a teenager leaving the country for the first time marveling at the Parthenon or a college student wandering around the villages of Spain on her own looking for direction.
We did all of the must have sight seeing in Greece - the Parthenon and Plaka, the ruins at Delphi, the theatre in Epidaurus. I ran the original Olympic stadium with one other girl and the tour guide made me a wreath crown from a nearby laurel tree. I'm not sure if I violated the customs rules about bringing agricultural products back to the states, but I did. The dried wreath still hanging in a frame in my old bedroom at home in Buffalo.
One of my favorite stories is about the time they dropped us off in Rhodes and told us we could go wander. My friend Sarah and I got lost, and figured the best way to find our way back to the boat we arrived on would be to just head for the water. We underestimated the fact that Rhodes is an island, and ended up on an extremely long walking tour through the maze of streets and neighborhoods. Lucky for us, Rhodes is a pretty small island.
We tried milkshakes made from goats milk, Greek coffee and ouzo (Yes, the nuns let us drink ouzo ... or maybe they had too much themselves and didn't notice ...)
I remember eating some the best and freshest food of my life in the quaintest little cafes and restaurants with amazing views of ancient ruins or beautiful coastlines. There were many a lunch on our own when Sarah and I figured it was more prudent to save our money for things like souvenirs, and just split and salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and ate it with pita and tzatziki.
So as my sister made her way across the ocean to Athens, I thought I would go Grecian in her honor. And what better way to celebrate a country I have such great memories of, than with my closest friends.
My Grecian cooking Odyssey did get off to a fairly rough start. I cut my time to get everything ready pretty close, and then of course my trip to Publix was hampered by what appears to be the arrival of the snow birds blocking the aisles and stealing my basket (no joke... I had to chase this old guy down to get it back). And apparently the recession has Publix scaling back hours for cashiers. So that took much longer than expected.
By the time I got home I found myself frantically peeling eggplants, slicing potatoes and frying them while simultaneously simmering onions and ground beef for the moussaka. Then there was the battle with the bottle of Greek wine, whose cork just about disintegrated into a fine powder when I tried to remove it from the bottle. My solution was to try to pry it out with a long fondue fork, but ended up accidentally (and roughly) shoving it into the bottle, cork attached, splashing the red wine all over my face and my kitchen. Thank goodness for aprons!
My laptop froze up just as I needed to consult with a recipe, so I had to take the time to restart it. I was still finishing the Greek salad and hadn't even started the tzatziki when my first batch of guests arrived - two children in tow - pulled out the baby bag of fun and their toddler promptly started exploring my living room. I brought in my chairs from the patio for people to sit on, not noticing the renegade palmetto bug that rode in on it. (We did promptly identify and take care of that issue).
But there were moments of peace in all this chaos. Every so often when you're scrambling to prepare a big meal - probably taking on too much - to entertain guests there are moments when all you can do is wait for something to finish. There are those times when you've done just about everything you can and you just have to wait for the meat to brown or the eggplants to fry before you can move on to to make something with it.
And in the end, when everything's done, all you can do is sit down with your friends and a nice glass of wine and enjoy every bite of it.
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