Dinner Diary: 36/52

Week 36 of Having People Over, and this one started with canceled plans and ended with a birthday serenade at the community pool. As one does.

This weekend was a double whammy of Labor Day and my birthday landing on the same day. I do a solo birthday trip every year, just me, a couple of days, some intentional planning and goal setting for the next few months. I’m fully aware that “working alone in a hotel room” is not most people’s idea of a birthday celebration, but I genuinely love it (any fellow solo birthday trip enthusiasts out there?) So with my solo reset happening earlier in the week, we kept Sunday low key as a family, and bumped our usual Having People Over to Monday for a Labor Day/B-day hang with friends we love who live about 45 minutes away. Morning surf, beach hang, afternoon BBQ poolside. The plan was excellent.

And then we got a text Monday morning: Sickness moving in the wrong direction, urgent care instead of surfing, plans canceled. The right call, absolutely the right call, and we were genuinely glad they made the call. Nobody wants a Labor Day illness spreading through the ranks. But it did leave us with a lot of food, a partial birthday cake, and a holiday Monday with no plans.

Robby and I talked it over and decided to send out a bat signal to the neighborhood: we have food, we have cake, we’ll be at the community pool from 4 to 6-ish if anyone wants to come. That was the whole plan. I’ll be honest, I felt a little sheepish about the optics of essentially throwing myself a last minute birthday party, but I’m so glad we went for it. If it weren’t for this resolution, I would have used our friends’ sickness as a completely valid excuse to cancel everything and call it a day. But we didn’t. The community pool counts as having people over, and we went with it.

For the menu, I had some frozen pizza dough, actually from our guests from last week, who recently started this business Leavenly Dough (full circle moment!). I’d been wanting to try it, so after a couple YouTube videos, I decided Monday was the day to attempt grilled pizza for the very first time. While hosting. Which is, as I have said many times in this newsletter, a rule I say never to do. And yet here we are. I break my own rules with remarkable consistency.

The first two pizzas were extra crispy on the bottom. If we’re being generous, we’ll call them rustic. If I’m being honest, they were burned. But here’s the thing about good dough, good marinara, fresh mozzarella, creamy burrata, pepperoni, some arugula, and a hot honey drizzle: it’s really hard to mess up completely, even when the bottom looks like a cautionary tale. They got better as I found my rhythm, and by the end I was feeling pretty good about the whole experiment. A Caesar Salad, my favorite classic Italian Pasta Salad, and Boursin Bruschetta with crackers rounded everything out and made the spread feel more intentional than the chaotic Monday it actually was.

Friends answered the bat signal! A few different families showed up, a gaggle of kids swam until they were pruney, and the evening turned into exactly the kind of gathering I didn’t know I needed. Someone insisted we sing happy birthday, so we gathered around 1/2 of a birthday cake, which was all that remained from the weekend, and I was properly serenaded at the community pool on Labor Day.

Nora may have missed a flag football practice (on Labor Day?), and Ollie and Robby had to slip out a bit early to run to a baseball practice (on Labor Day?), but the whole thing wrapped up the way most of our best hosting experiences do: a little chaotic, a little improvised, and completely worth it. It was not at all what I expected when I woke up yesterday, but it turned out so great.

I’m feeling full (of pizza and gratitude); for this neighborhood, for this Recipe Club community, for you. Regardless of what plans do or don’t come together, I’m always glad we extended the invite. Still always happy we hosted.

See you next Sunday at 5.

xo, Kelsey