They Don't Know I Threw This Party Just for the Food
'We are obligated to create the social world we want,' she writes. 'Intimacy, togetherness — the opposite of the crushing loneliness so many people seem to feel — are what parties alchemize.'
There is no better time to make such a case: The unmistakable malaise that is January swiftly replaced any end-of-year euphoria. And while I cannot wait for this dreadful month to end, what peeks over the horizon — February — is hardly a bastion of bliss.
So be your own euphoria. Throw a party! You needn't an occasion. (Though, if you really do, just look to yesterday's Lunar New Year or the forthcoming Super Bowl or Valentine's Day for inspiration.) By Cushing's logic, 10 people a party makes. By my own logic, there must be food. And at least one dish must include puff pastry.
You could make Ali Slagle's baked Brie puffs with chile crisp or ginger-scallion squiggles, or Tejal Rao's aptly named party wreath. Stuffed with well-spiced potatoes and peas, it invokes aloo samosas, without you needing to fold individual pastries.
Or lean into the folding and pleating of a full-scale dumpling party. Eric Kim's kimchi napjak mandu (use a vegan kimchi), Genevieve Ko's sweet chocolate sesame dumplings or Hetty Lui McKinnon's vegetarian gok jai are reason enough to invite over your most dexterous friends. Hetty's vegetable crystal dumplings pack a lot of veg into tiny, translucent packages: You'll get a little shiitake and wood ear mushroom, carrot, celery, water chestnut and pickled mustard stem, as well as tofu, in each bite.
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