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Kaitlyn: Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Martha Stewart literally did surgery on a grape. This was nearly 20 years before the idea became a confusing internet meme. She invented it! In her 1999 book Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, which I recently received as a 30th-birthday gift, Martha sincerely recommends hollowing out grapes and filling them, individually, with goat cheese and crumbled pistachios. She also recommends hollowing out cucumbers, apples, pattypan squash, and, if you can believe it, cherry tomatoes. Of course, I know that Martha has a good reason for everything she does, even if it isn’t obvious to me what it could be. I am very humble and I am taking notes.

Lizzie and I are always trying to educate ourselves about parties. We would like to be perfect hosts. We know our limits, but we strive to surpass them—it’s called shooting for the moon and landing among the stars. That’s why we study texts like Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, and why another of my 30th-birthday gifts was a packet of papers that Lizzie printed off the internet, detailing how Nancy Reagan planned for dinners at the White House. I think my favorite book about parties is probably Putnam’s Book of Parties, from 1928, which explains a concept called “Mushroom Party”—you decorate a high-school gymnasium to look like an enchanted forest, then you make up a bunch of prophecies and write them on cards tied to mushrooms, then you ask someone to pretend to be a witch. As each teen approaches the witch, she stirs her cauldron and mutters:

Seek a mushroom in the forest,

In the dank and blue-lit forest,

Bearing on its stem this number.

Tell thee what the Fates shall give thee

In the days that lie before thee.

Go—but let not word nor laughter

Pass thy lips until thou find it.

And then everyone drinks coffee!

Of course, there’s only so much you can learn from reading. At some point, you’ll need to take the next step: a four-week course held on Zoom. That’s how Lizzie and I ended up enrolling in “The Table as Canvas: Designing a Bizarro Dinner Party,” hosted by the chef Jen Monroe, whose very cool and interesting career we’ve been following ever since she served us jellyfish sorbet at a dystopian-themed dinner party in 2017.

Lizzie: When Kaitlyn first sent me the course sign-up page, I imagined a laboratory of bizarro dinner-party scientists sitting studiously at stainless-steel tables somewhere in Midtown, learning how to make carrot rosettes. But I would come to find out, as Kaitlyn mentioned, that this was an online course. I’ll admit that there was a twinge of disappointment, but I understand that the internet means access to a larger audience and it also means none of your classmates ever have to see what you look like.

What reading did I do in preparation? Well, I’m basically always reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel to stave off my despair, and one of the many constantly repeated activities in his books is eating and drinking at large estates in the countryside. A chef is always in charge of the meals because everyone is rich, but none of the food ever sounds particularly appetizing: soft-boiled eggs, deviled kidneys, whatever a “savoury” is, a magical hangover cure made with Worcestershire sauce and a raw egg.

All of this to say that I may have been—pardon me—starved for inspiration when the first class rolled around.

A screenshot from class. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: The first week of class, I hustled home from work, went straight into the bedroom, and shut the door. Our instructor, Jen, called us from a room full of cake pans, and started off by asking us to “clarify” our “goals” for the course. My goal, as I said, was to become perfect.

Jen told us not to be afraid of the many constraints imposed by time, money, skill level, etc. These would only serve to make us more creative, she argued. For example, a former student had made her apartment more like a 24-hour diner for a 24-hour-diner dinner party simply by making the floors a little bit sticky on purpose. This innovation took hardly any time or skill and cost her nothing, except for the raised eyebrows of at least two strangers who heard about it years later on Zoom.

60-some people were on the Zoom call with us, and we soon got the opportunity to meet a few of them. After Jen played a clip of the food-fight scene in Hook, she put us in breakout rooms to discuss any notable childhood memories we might have about food. I said that my mom had always bought the puffy Cheetos, so when I went to the homes of friends whose mothers bought crunchy Cheetos, I thought there was something kind of sinister about that. “At least you had snacks,” one woman in my group responded. Well, sure.

Lizzie: My breakout room was a somewhat stilted place, but we did eventually get into a rhythm. I talked about eating crickets and astronaut ice cream at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City as a child. In my notes, I wrote, “I have no memories,” which longtime readers will recognize as something I’ve said before.

I also wrote, “We’re gonna need a bigger budget,” after Jen played a clip of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the 1989 Peter Greenaway movie that takes place in a restaurant and ends with a dinner party to which I would not want to be invited. (Spoiler: A very crispy man is served atop a bed of Brassicaceae.) Thankfully, Jen did not play that particular scene, which would have turned all of our stomachs.

I left the class a little hungry and wondering why you can’t stream this movie anywhere right now.

Kaitlyn: I really wanted to watch it! They don’t even have it at the library!

Our homework assignment for the first week was to make a mood board that would capture the desired spirit of our dream dinner party. As I mentioned, I was very inspired by Martha doing surgery on a grape. I also love Jell-O. So I thought, What about a party combining these two things? For appetizers, I could hollow out lots of different fruits and vegetables, just like Martha, and then, unlike Martha, I could fill them with various flavors of gelatin. Because it’s almost Christmas, I looked for further inspiration from my favorite Christmas story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, in which the characters are obsessed with festive, multicolored “Who Pudding,” which appears to be Jell-O-like.

After a few days of scrolling through Instagram, I had several dozen photos of improbable gelatin-based dishes with garish Dr. Seuss aesthetics. I was especially excited about the idea of “Cranberry Candles,” which are candles made from cranberry sauce, strawberry Jell-O, and mayonnaise, then decorated with orange-peel stars. I thought they would make a stunning centerpiece.

Martha's instructions for grape surgery. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: I like that the mayo is both in the Jell-O and served on the side. Mayo two ways. My theme came from Matt, who loves a Mai Tai and will do anything (anything!) to have one. Before the class started, we were planning on having a vaguely 1960s tiki holiday party inspired by Lee’s Hawaiian Islander, in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, so I stuck to that idea. I put this photo on my mood board, but as I currently own no rattan furniture, achieving this look may be slightly out of reach.

Because this holiday party was never meant to be a sit-down dinner, my menu so far is relegated to the “bites” arena, and lacks Kaitlyn’s structural, textural, and mayo-ral innovation. If you have ideas for how to make mini hotdogs and a fruit tower feel more elaborate, please let me know.

Kaitlyn: I think the fruit tower will be good. I can’t wait to see the fruit tower. I do think it will be expensive and possibly wasteful. I know I would feel some hesitation to rip a banana off of a beautiful sculpture. Lizzie and Matt will really have to enforce a rule of “eat the fruit tower,” and I think they might even have to pay someone to go first.

For the second week of class, Lizzie came over to my apartment and Nathan put the Zoom up on the TV for us. To start, Jen reminded us that we were supposed to have been thinking about the “feeling” we wanted to evoke with our dinner parties. I’d forgotten to do this.”What’s your feeling?” Nathan asked. “Uh … Grinch,” I said. He was like, “Evil?” And I said no, of course not. I was thinking more of the end of the movie, when he’s carving the “roast beast” and everybody is singing. “Redemption?” he offered. Yes!

Nathan said the feeling for his dream dinner party would be “decay,” but he didn’t explain how he would execute that, because we promptly reminded him that he is not in the class.

Lizzie: Peter Greenaway might have an idea he could use …

This week’s class was about menu and logistics. Jen kindly reminded us to consider our limits. For example, we may want to think twice before cracking into our 401Ks to buy enough beef tenderloin to feed a midsize town’s elementary school. This would have been helpful a few years ago, before I accidentally spent a few hundred dollars on a giant slab of beef tenderloin for a New Year’s Eve party.

The most fun part of the class was when Jen showed us some of the “bizarro” things she’s done with food. It made me realize I could probably dream bigger, which I guess is literally the point of being inspired.

Kaitlyn: We got excited when Jen showed us some wacky, multicolored lollipops she’d made. She said that all she’d done was melt a bunch of Jolly Ranchers and mix them together. That sounded like something we could do—which would cost about $7—and everyone would be impressed by the result!

Toward the end of class, she started to get into the nitty-gritty—the practical considerations. Don’t invite more people than you have plates for, bring a rolling suitcase to the grocery store, that kind of thing. Jen said that it’s important to consider course timing and portions, as well. Serving too much food can be just as bad as serving not enough food, she explained. Here, Nathan and I told Lizzie our patently unsympathetic story about being served too many dinner courses and too many complimentary desserts at the fancy restaurant Pujol in Mexico City on my aforementioned recent 30th birthday. (When the waiter brought a pair of cream puffs along with our check, I almost cried.) I understand that this is a disgusting thing to complain about, but that is exactly why serving too much food makes people feel bad!

Nathan then pointed out that my Jell-O dinner might have the opposite problem: It might not fill anyone up to eat only Jell-O for dinner. I’d already thought of a solution to this, though. In the corner of the dining room, there will be a table with a pile of loose baguettes on it. If anybody gets hungry, they can just walk over there and rip off some hunks. And you know, if you have to grab a piece of pizza on the way home, that’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s why we live in New York City.

Lizzie: Jell-O does have a small amount of protein in it (due to the hooves), but maybe you could boost the satiety factor by throwing some salami in there. I also have concerns about people leaving my party hungry, but I’m thinking I’ll include one of those hidden-picture images in the invitation where it looks like Santa but it’s actually dozens of chicken nuggets—essentially subliminal messaging suggesting that people should eat beforehand.

Kaitlyn: For homework, we’re supposed to begin doing more in-depth research and development and testing our recipes. The first one I’m planning to try is a dish I saw on Reddit. It’s a can of pineapple rings with lime Jell-O poured directly into it. After it sets, you dump the whole thing out and slice it up. Also, to Lizzie’s point about protein, I’m thinking I’ll do a “Garden Salad Ring,” which is lemon Jell-O with radishes and hard-boiled eggs inside.

Lizzie: As I mentioned earlier, my menu could still use some work. Shrimp luge, perhaps?

Kaitlyn: Please look out for a special Christmas Day issue of Famous People! It will be about a triumphant holiday dinner party at Lizzie’s house.

Lizzie: Let’s call it dinner-party-lite.