friendsgiving & how to host one
Create your guest list and send out those invitations! I really love Partiful, a web based app that allows invitees to RSVP, leave comments, and fill out questionnaires if desired, which really comes in handy when culling potluck contributions or due diligence on dietary restrictions. With a potluck, you definitely want to be mindful about what food groups are acknowledged or overrepresented. Your event probably doesn’t need six salads and four pastas! (Unless, of course, greens and grains are your theme…)
You’ll want to decide on a gathering style for your dinner, which may already be indicated by the number of folks you have attending. Last fall in 2021, I really wanted to have a sit down meal at my dining table, with no more than eight people total—for this, I was prepared to cook the entire meal to my exact liking, only asking that guests bring the gauchest most buttery California chardonnay they could find, to work with the roasted mushroom and caramelized onion macaroni and cheese I was making. That time of year really took me out and I was forced to cancel dinner at the last minute.
Missing out on my party hosting dreams last year really brought me to a tenacious energy on 2022’s go around. This year I decided I wanted a looser intimacy in favor of bolder, free-wheeling festivity. My friend Hannah sent me this Strategist article, How to Host Friendsgiving for 25 in a One-Bedroom Apartment, the other week amidst my party planning, and I lost my mind with laughter. I had just checked the Partiful RSVPs and, at that point, 23 guests had confirmed to fill up my Bushwick 1BR.
I hate cold food meant to be enjoyed hot. How are you planning to keep your dishes warm? This question is directly linked to the length of time and style of your event. If you’re hosting a timed, sit down dinner, then keeping the food hot will be less of a concern! If you are going party-style, like me, where you expect your guests to stagger in throughout the day or evening, then you’ll want to find a method you can rely on. Holidays in my family used to be much grander affairs, I grew up with all our dishes warming on sternos, but haven’t had to use any in a long time and certainly had never arranged one by myself. Something about sterno racks just seem so… dated, and for reasons I don’t completely understand! But we know they are useful.
So maybe you want to set out all your dishes out on the dining table and eat family style. Maybe you want to keep food warm in the oven or on the stove, making sure people know what’s what and allowing themselves to help themselves. Maybe you want to set up a folding table with the sternos—in which case, if holding a potluck, make sure to let folks bringing dishes know to transport their hot entrees in aluminum half or full trays they can find at the grocery store. You won’t want to deal with transferring pounds of protein and sides to pans that you bought while everyone is trickling in.
Literally draw out your layout! Where will your appetizers go—a socially centered space, or away from the fray? Are beer, wine, liquor, and mixers all grouped together, or divided? Will people get their water from a pitcher or the sink? Do you have ice!!
Anything you can make ahead of time… do. My Friendsgiving was on a Saturday and the earliest delivery time I could get for my primary groceries was Friday morning, so I didn’t have as much lead time as I would have preferred, but worked it out. On Friday I prepared the cranberry sauce, boiled the pasta, shredded the various cheddars and mozzarella
On requests from guests, as the host (and in all matters), you should ask for what you want! On my event page I welcomed all spirits (alcoholic lol) but also clarified that if one did want to pander to my favor, they’d do well to bring over some Crown Royal Regal Apple whiskey. I am who I am (a girl from the Bronx). Quite luckily for me, that note was entertained and then some: one of my guests decided on an apple pie, boosted by Crown. My heart… it swells.
Agenda
12:30pm appetizers and mingling
2pm all food hits sternos
5pm dessert out
8pm you don’t have to go home but… please get the hell out ❤
The Potable Candle
Mulled cider with cranberries. Wow. I absolutely jacked this idea (along with the dutch oven) from my friend Olabimpe who had this simmering at their birthday party the previous weekend. I watched as they put it together: a gallon of apple cider, a few handfuls of cranberry, tosses of cinnamon sticks, star anise, all spice, and cloves. Her apartment brimmed with all these robust and warming notes in the air in a way that I had to recreate. I kept this on the stove all day with a ladle and hot-drink cups.
Appetizers
Grazing (cheese) board with chicken apple sausage, pomegranate, castelvetrano olives, smoked oysters, and $8 caviar. Cheeses used: sliced cheddar, muenster, gouda, and pepper jack—I got these as part of a $10 spread from BJ’s; a goat milk cheese wheel with lavender and fennel pollen; Boursin; and a blue cheese triangle. I did buy brie for the pull apart bread and meant to throw in an additional wheel for the board, but simply forgot!
One of my guests reported a gluten allergy so in addition to Triscuits, I made sure to set out a couple boxes of almond flower crackers with rosemary and sea salt.
Cranberry and brie pull apart bread. Wow. She is… the moment. I was curious about what exciting things I might be able to do with cranberry and cheese before coming across this great recipe from Half Baked Harvest. It calls for a sourdough but I got a basic Italian loaf because it was all I could find online with the holiday time crunch and rush. Really fun and low maintenance offering—basically you just deeply score the bread, stuff it with cubes of brie, gratuitous cranberry, and brown sugar coated chopped pecans with butter.
Crown Fried Chicken hot wings. I was expecting upwards of 20 people and at some point through the planning, I realized that… I might not have enough meat on the menu! I assumed my friend who volunteered to bring jerk chicken would opt for a half tray—I mean, have you seen the cost of meat these days? My god. None of my guests reported an aversion to meat, so it worked for everyone!
I set it out with blue cheese dressing, though the “right” choice might have been ranch. I accommodate in a lot of places, but on this, I was less interested in people pleasing. Whoops! (Crown Fried doesn’t even serve ranch anyway!)
Chips and dip. If there’s one thing I love… it’s a fried pickle. Or, a pickle at all. BJ’s was slanging this fried pickle and ranch dip I knew I had to try, so I set that out along with a blue crab dip and tzatziki. The crab dip from Costco was one of the things I looked forward to the most with the holidays growing up. We only had it once a year and while the adults puttered around the kitchen I would post up in the living room, standing loyal guard over my fave.
Options I considered but ultimately nixed to preserve the budget: various hummus, onion dip, buffalo chicken dip. For the chips I went with a party sized bag of Wavy Lays.
Kebé.
I think our appetizer assortment was pretty damn hearty and fun! It was certainly enough to make the entrees stretch a little more, which helped me out with some anxiety I had around “Will there be enough food?!”. But before we even get to the meal, there’s bread! There’s cheese! There’s chicken! There’s sweets!
Dinner
Macaroni pie. Whew, baby. Two pounds and a full tray.
Candied yams. Is it a vegetable? Is it a starch? Is it dessert? Who cares… it’s not a (black) holiday dinner without her.
Collard greens with smoked turkey necks. Just… picture this… a strong black muslim woman… dreaming of a day… someone else… might fix her some greens… sans them damn ham hocks! Dream unlocked and fulfilled!
Blue Mountain Curry chicken. I cooked about fourteen pounds of chicken thighs on the pressure cook setting of my crockpot! Total cook time? 30 minutes. Pretty amazing efficiency for a big meat dish intended to serve a couple dozen people. For additional volume and oomph, I included a few pounds of Yukon gold potatoes.
Jerk chicken. Diversity!
Roasted potatoes. A nice basic carb that plays nice with all the powerful flavors happening!
Stuffing. I remember the first year I took over my family’s turkey day and forgot the stuffing… talk about a public shaming. Since then! I made it a mission to learn how to make a spectacular stuffing from scratch, and succeeded. However, there was no way I was going to undertake that task this year with everything else going on. I delegated!
Cranberry sauce. Fresh cranberries, some sugar, water, and orange liqueur and voila! That iconic sweet tangy complement to every flavor in the house. I know that the canned stuff is uh, beloved, in some cultures. But I cannot do it.
Brioche rolls. I would’ve been fine with the Martin’s potato rolls but this was what I could find as holiday foods have started selling out aggressively. Not mad at it!
Two salads. A couple of people mentioned they were undecided on a veggie dish on my questionnaire; after some evaluation of the menu a week shy of the big day, I figured we could use some cool freshness, and also, very important: I was running out of sterno rack real estate.
Dessert
Crown apple pie. yum.
Cheesecake. Yum!
