Dinner Diary: 35/52

Week 35 of Having People Over, and this week we finally made good on a dinner we’d been talking about for two years.

Two years. Of “we should do dinner!” and “yes, let’s!” and “the ball’s in your court, just say when!” and then life just keeps moving and somehow another month goes by. I’m a little embarrassed by how many conversations in my orbit look exactly like this one, stretched across months and years with the best intentions and no actual follow-through. This resolution has been quietly fixing that, one Sunday at a time, and I love it for that.

Southern California has been in a proper heatwave this week. We’ve gotten soft with our mild climate, I won’t pretend otherwise, but there were a couple of days this past week where we had some of the highest humidity in the country and it was genuinely brutal. The idea of firing up the grill felt slightly unhinged. I was craving steak, so we did it anyway.

Robby manned the grill, as any good spouse does, and by Sunday the weather had settled into something more manageable. The menu felt like exactly the right send-off for summer: Grilled Skirt Steak and Shrimp, both finished with a homemade chimichurri that I could honestly eat with a spoon. Chimichurri is a bright, herbaceous Argentinian sauce made with fresh parsley, garlic, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and a little heat from red pepper flakes. It’s punchy and fresh and it makes everything it touches taste better. The steak and shrimp together with that chimichurri was one of those plates where everything just works.

We also had two salads going, which felt right for a warm evening. A new September Recipe Club recipe: a Crunchy Roasted Peanut Salad with hearty kale, crunchy bell peppers, and the most delicious peanut vinaigrette I’ve made in a while. And then Robby’s personal request, the Peach, Tomato, and Burrata Salad with Basil Vinaigrette, because peaches are at their absolute peak right now and it felt criminal not to use them. When it’s all on the plate together, the peach and burrata alongside the steak and chimichurri, the flavor combinations are just so good. Also, does burrata ever really go wrong? It does not. A fruit and veggie platter kept the kids grazing, and for dessert I made a Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie, which is exactly what it sounds like: one giant warm cookie, served straight from the pan with vanilla ice cream melting over the top. Similar energy to a pizookie if you know the reference. It is always, always a hit.

Our guests this week are friends we met a couple years back but never quite managed to properly sit down with until now. We’re in the same broader community, our kids have been at different schools, but now we both have freshmen at the high school so our worlds are starting to overlap more. They have four kids ranging from elementary through high school, which mixed pretty naturally with our three.

The thing I didn’t anticipate was how much Robby and I would get out of the adult conversation this week. It turns out this family has recently started a business together, and it overlaps with the food space in a way that meant we had an almost embarrassing amount to talk about. The grind of entrepreneurship, the specific challenges of building something in the food world, the wins that feel huge and the losses that feel personal. All of it. There is something genuinely refreshing about sitting across from people who understand that particular mindset without needing it explained, and I left the table feeling seen in a way I wasn’t expecting from a Sunday dinner.

The kids started the night cautiously, as kids who don’t know each other tend to do, and by the time we cut into the giant cookie someone was at the piano, someone else had picked up the guitar, and the rest of them were somewhere in the house playing hide and seek. That arc, from polite strangers to full chaos, is one of my favorite things about this whole year.

Two years of meaning to. One Sunday to finally do it. Always happy we hosted.

See you next Sunday at 5.

xo, Kelsey

p.s. The chimichurri recipe is in Recipe Club and I genuinely think it might be the move for your next dinner party. You’ve been warned.