And there are leftovers, too.

Chad's birthday dinner and Jess's graduation party were on Friday night and last night we had some people over for dinner. I've been reflecting lately that -- New Mexicans aside -- for most social gatherings that we attend, we're either the oldest or the youngest in the room. We're almost never in the middle. I've also been thinking about the ways in which my preferences for social gatherings are changing. By and large I'm more interested in smaller and quieter these days.

But as for the food: last night I made a risotto primavera that came out pretty well even if I forgot to give people good cheese to grate on top of it, plus a spinach-mango-candied pecan salad that would have been better had there been more mango. It turns out that candying pecans takes about 10 minutes start to finish and the results are damn good, so I'm going to do this more often. Chris made a standard tomato-basil-mozzerella salad plus our first recipe from the Mario Batali cookbook that we got when we went to Salumi, something called devil's chicken. It was basically roast chicken with lots of black pepper and chile oil and red onion and cherry tomatoes and Italian parsley. This cookbook looks pretty good -- the recipes are much more straightforward than the ones in his previous books. The stuff looks actually cookable. By which I mean actually cookable by me.

Dinner parties, even dinner parties where we're the only ones drinking, are Not Too Bad.