Spice Up Your Life

Recipes and a prep timeline for a weeknight dinner party that doesn't skimp on flavor.

What I’m Thinking About:

☕ Helen Levi did a collab with Big Night and I neeeeed it.

🍦 If I lived in NYC, I’d be bee lining to Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream for their collab with Russ & Daughters, starting with the 5-layer Halvah ice cream bar.

🍒 This would’ve been the perfect dessert for the dinner party. Bookmark it if you follow the plan outlined below.

🧀 Bookmarked this because everyone seems to be cooking with halloumi these days.

What I Made:

I’d been wanting to host a dinner party in our new apartment, but kept subconsciously coming up with excuses of why not to. “We haven’t hung the art on the walls”, “not everything is unpacked”, “maybe we should get a bigger table?”, the list goes on. Then, my friends and I were trying to figure out a plan for dinner before a concert, and I decided to spontaneously volunteer to host. It was the perfect opportunity to commit and not overthink, given that it was for the following day. I also knew that I’d only have about an hour of time between work and when my friends came over to put the finishing touches on the meal. Because of that, I picked out recipes I knew were 1.) easy and delicious and 2.) had components that could be prepped ahead and 3.) didn’t require a lot of active cooking time or fancy cooking techniques day of. The last thing I wanted was to have to stand at the stove and stir a risotto for a whole half hour. Here’s what I landed on:

Appetizers:

• Aged gouda, Parmesan crisps, multigrain pita crackers and castelvetrano olives.

Entree:

• Oven Roasted Chicken Shawarma from NYT Cooking.

Sides:

• Eden Grinshpan’s Honey Roasted Parsnips (I used carrots instead of parsnips) with Dates and Tzatziki from Eating out Loud. I found the recipe online here in case you don’t have the cookbook, but this is easily one of my most used and recommended cookbooks. I doubled the recipe and tripled the amount of tzatziki to have extra on the side.

• Watermelon Feta Salad from NYT Cooking

  • Read the comments and subbed in lime juice in place of the vinegar per several recommendations. No regrets. You could also easily sub in mint for the basil.

• Store-bought pita

• Crumbled feta

How I prepped:

Day before:

• Shop for groceries.

• Make the marinade for the chicken shawarma.

  • I probably could have started marinating the chicken that night, but the recipe said to marinate for 1-12 hours, and I’m a rule follower...

• Peel and quarter the carrots. Put these in a gallon sized zip lock bag.

• Make the tzatziki.

• Cut up the watermelon.

  

  

  

Morning of:

• Combine the chicken thighs in marinade in a gallon sized bag and put it in the fridge.

Final prep:

I only had about an hour of time to cook and get everything on the table between getting home from work and my friends arriving for dinner, which is in part why I picked the recipes I did. Here’s how I made it work:

• Preheat the oven.

• While the oven is preheating, quarter the red onion, throw it in the bag with the chicken + marinade, mix it all together, then use tongs to get the chicken and red onion onto a sheet pan. Next, prep the honey mixture for the carrots, pour it over the carrots in the bag to combine, then pour the whole mixture onto another sheetpan.

• Place both sheet pans in the oven once preheated. Let them cook for ~30 minutes. I tossed the carrots halfway through.

• While everything’s cooking, I toasted and chopped the hazelnuts and chopped the dates and extra dill. I then crumbled the feta over the watermelon, drizzled it with olive oil and lime juice, added in basil, and tossed it. I plated the apps to set out for people to nibble on when they arrived. I set the table and spread tzatziki on a platter for the carrots.

• Once the chicken and carrots were done, I plated the carrots on the tzatziki platter, and topped with the hazelnuts, dates and dill. This was the perfect amount of time to let the chicken rest. I then sliced the chicken and plated it with the red onions.

  

Anddddd, dinner was served! For a party of 4, a single recipe of the chicken was enough (it calls for 2 lbs of chicken thighs) and we had some leftover. I had doubled the carrot recipe because I knew it was just that good, and sure enough, we nearly finished it off among the 4 of us. Do yourself a favor and double the carrots/parsnips. Maybe even triple.

I opted out of a dessert just because we already had plenty of food and I didn’t want to stress myself out. With that being said, there are lots of quick desserts you could prep ahead! Vanilla ice cream topped with some Graza finishing oil and sea salt would’ve absolutely hit the spot.

If you follow the plan outlined above to host your own dinner party, please let me know! Would love to know what you loved about it, learned from it, or how you upgraded it!