The California produce that inspired it all.
I never knew what the cuisine "California Cooking" was until it occurred to me a few months after living here. California Cooking is the way California ingredients inspire - or even DEMAND - you cook them. Literally, visibly bursting with color and flavor. A rainbow of fruits and veggies, invariably, every week of the year. Outdoor market every. week. of. the. year. The produce in California is romance. It makes you want to eat a raw tomato on the way home and to cook a dinner party with the bounty that night. California cooking is the bright and light yet comfortable cozy feeling of a Sunday evening.
The perennially voluptuous Fort Mason, San Francisco farmers market as my muse, I began pushing the limits of SF apartment capacity and became addicted to hosting dinner parties.
Dinner parties are meals defined not by the attendee list (1-20+) nor by the occasion (I promise you can think of a reason any day) but instead by the desire to transform the mundane human requirement of caloric consumption into a celebration of friendship, nature, and the possibility of indulgence in the everyday.
My first dinner parties were impossible not to love: Wisconsin lake house summers with a gaggle of cousins. It was the people, the place, the day before and the night after. The many helpers and the many chores and the miracle of it somehow leading to 12-15 chairs around a table with full plates. My nuclear family did not do at-home dinners except Christmas and Thanksgiving, making lake house dinners all the more fantastical and intoxicating.
Big family lake house dinners in Wisconsin.
How fantastical, though, to have my own kitchen to cook in and my own house to host in and my own friends to feed. To finally design my own dinner parties after years of eagerly awaiting July when they happened to me. To transform the fruits of the season into a curated creation. To decorate and choreograph. To make my chosen loved ones feel the magic once orchestrated by Grandma and the adults -- a feast and a setting to enjoy it together.
Piling my own tables (spanning apartments and cities) high with plant-based cooking, surrounded by loved ones.
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