Unfortunately, I Had An Idea
Six people. One ingredient. An unreasonable number of apples for a Wednesday night.
I have done this before.
A while ago, I had five friends over for dinner and made everything about tomatoes.
I called it Get Sauced.
It was ridiculous.
It was also extremely fun.
So naturally, instead of treating this as a thing I had done once, I decided it was now a format.
The One Ingredient Party.
Then my book club read Theo of Golden, and I was hosting our next dinner.
So I needed an ingredient.
Golden.
Golden Delicious.
Get it?
A pun.
That was enough for me.
And that is how six people ended up eating an unreasonable number of apples on a Wednesday night.
ONE INGREDIENT. LOTS OF APPLES.
The rules of a One Ingredient Party are psychotic.
Pick an ingredient.
Build the menu around it.
For this one, that meant a roasted butternut squash and apple galette, a kale salad with a fig and cider dressing, apple cider chicken meatballs, caramelized onion and apple flatbread, a cheese board with savory apple chutney, and a signature cocktail - an Apple French 75.
And because apparently that wasn't sufficient:
Apple cider ice cream. With warm brown butter oat and pecan streusel topped with flaky sea salt.
On a Wednesday.
The apples came from a pun.
The portraits actually came from the book.
One of the things I loved about Theo of Golden was the way portraits were used to make ordinary people feel like they were worth noticing. Theo encounters people, gifts them their portraits, and gives them something that says, essentially: you are worthwhile.
I loved that.
So everyone got a portrait.
Except these were stick figures.
Printed on cardstock.
With increasingly questionable titles.
This seemed like an appropriate tribute.
And because apparently handing someone a stick-figure portrait at dinner wasn't enough, they became part of the table too.
This is generally the stage at which a normal dinner starts becoming a Had An Idea dinner.
THINGS ESCALATED.
There were apple-shaped menus.
There were Golden Delicious apples all over the table.
There were apple socks.
There was a point at which I was wandering around the internet looking at apple-shaped pitchers and apple-covered taper candles as though these were suddenly objects of legitimate importance.
They were not.
I bought some things anyway.
STUFF I WANT TO BUY, BUT SHOULDN'T: APPLE EDITION →
I also made homemade ice cream.
But I bought the pie crust.
And the pizza dough.
And the puff pastry.
Because the goal here is not to suffer.
THE TABLE
The table was apples, white hydrangea, brass candlesticks, white tapers, rattan chargers, autumnal madras cloth napkins, and the portraits.
Nothing matched the theme so aggressively that you felt like you'd walked into an apple orchard gift shop.
At least I don't think it did.
The actual apples did most of the work.
Which is useful because after dinner you can eat your centerpiece.
THE FOOD
The rule is the ingredient has to show up in everything.
Everything.
Including the cocktail.
So the night started with the cocktail and went from there.
At some point, finding another place to put an apple becomes less of a menu-planning exercise and more of a personal challenge.
This is the part I enjoy.
A NOTE ABOUT THE GALETTE
The galette deserves special mention mostly because it looked like I had tried considerably harder than I did.
Roasted squash, thinly sliced apple, feta, rosemary, chile and pepitas.
Store-bought pie crust.
Nice shit allowed. Store-bought dough also allowed.
AND THEN I MADE ICE CREAM.
I own an ice cream maker that had been sitting in a cabinet for approximately eleven years that I’ve used sparingly.
Apparently apple week was the moment I decided to find out if it still worked after not having used it since Getting Sauced.
It did.
Apple cider ice cream with brown-butter oat streusel and flaky salt.
Completely necessary?
No.
Would do again?
Immediately.
