Dinner Diary: 37/52

Week 37 of Having People Over, and this week we reunited with two families who go all the way back to our New York days.

The timing felt fitting. Last Friday marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and all week long we’d been thinking about New York, seeing the tributes and the photos and the stories, and feeling that particular mix of grief and love and gratitude. We didn’t live in New York on 9/11, and only moved there years after. When Ollie was a newborn we were living in Brooklyn and from his bedroom window we had a direct view of lower Manhattan and watched the new World Trade Center go up over that time. There’s something quietly extraordinary about looking back at photos of a tiny Ollie in his crib with that building still under construction in the background, knowing what it represents and what it replaced. A sobering, beautiful reminder of how much the city has endured and rebuilt. All of that was in the air this week, and it made gathering with our New York people feel like exactly the right thing to do.

These are friends from our Upper East Side days, back when Robby and I were young newlyweds, no kids, figuring out how to make the New York dream work on a tight budget. The further north and east you go in Manhattan, the more affordable the rent becomes, which means there’s a natural gathering of young professionals all in the same season of life, all trying to make it work. We were all in that world together and have so many memories from that chapter, the kind that feel like they belong to a completely different version of us.

Seventeen or eighteen years later, two of those families somehow ended up in our same small town in Southern California. We’ve crossed paths occasionally since, but we’d never done a proper get-together until this week. Which is embarrassing, honestly, and also exactly the kind of thing this resolution was built to fix.

We loved the idea of a loose NYC reunion, and both families said yes immediately. Walking back into our house Sunday night, I kept having this surreal moment of looking around at all these kids, ten(!) of them between us, ranging from 16 down to 6, and remembering that the last time we were all in the same place together, none of them existed. The energy in the house was buzzing in the best possible way.

For the menu I went back to taco night, which is the right call for a large group every single time. I tripled my carnitas recipe, which turned out to be more carnitas than even three families and ten children could consume, so we have lunch and at least another dinner or two sorted out this week. Could’ve doubled it and been totally fine. Even when I do this for a living, sometimes the math is still off. Always learning. I also made a double batch of my Baked Chicken Taquitos, which were a huge hit alongside the carnitas, cilantro lime rice, spiced black beans, homemade guacamole, pickled red onions, a fruit platter that the kids demolished faster than anything else on the table, and all the toppings.

For dessert, the choice was obvious. My Magnolia Bakery-inspired banana pudding, which I recently added to Recipe Club and have been looking for any excuse to make again. It only felt right for a New York reunion. It was a hit. I may also be eating the leftovers as I type this.

The passage of time is a genuinely strange thing to sit with. The conversation kept going back and forth between catching up on the present and reminiscing about the past: what happened to so-and-so, did you hear where they ended up, can you believe it’s been this long. Life has dealt some people some unpredictable hands over these past fifteen-plus years, and there’s something both sweet and bittersweet about that kind of catch-up. We’re all a little older, a lot more tired, and somehow so much richer for everything that’s happened in between.

I will always love New York. But I’m happy with where we are now, and I’m so glad we finally made this happen.

Always happy we hosted.

See you next Sunday at 5.

xo, Kelsey