Saturday night, I had a party. The occasion? I wanted to have a party. The theme? “I really hope all these people will fit in my apartment.” And they did – 40+ of them. The takeaway? Give people good company, good drinks, and good snacks, and they’ll sweat merrily along in a crowd.

About the drinks: This was a largely BYOB party, though I served two signature cocktails:

Prosecco with pineapple-ginger puree
(Makes enough puree for about 3 bottles of Prosecco)

Butcher 2 pineapples and puree until very smooth in a blender; stir in about 2 tablespoons ginger juice (make by taking about half a hand-sized piece of ginger and grate with a ginger grater or Microplane, then squeeze with cheesecloth or your fingers). Keep puree mixture chilled until ready to serve. To make cocktails, fill glass about 1/3 full with puree, and fill the rest of the way with chilled Prosecco; stir.

Agave lemonade with (optional) bourbon

I made my lemonade to taste but The Jewish Hostess has a more exact recipe – or try making a blended version with ice and fresh mint!

But about those snacks. Because this was a late-night party (started at 10, ended at dawn), nobody needed dinner, but rather a selection of crunchy, appealing, booze-soakingly-carby snacks: some sweet, some savory.  I didn’t want to spend all day cooking, so I kept it simple, and relied on a few excellent local producers instead of making it all from scratch. 

Curried popcorn: fresh-popped popcorn (we are lucky to have the fantastic local popcorn from Oak Grove Plantation at the greenmarket) sprayed with olive oil (I have to admit, I own and love a Misto), and sprinkled generously with curry powder and sea salt.

A selection of dips from local dipmaster Kors D’Oeuvres with corn chips and locally-made Martin’s Pretzels (the combination of the herbed blue cheese dip and the pretzels was so tasty that by party time, there wasn’t enough blue cheese left for the party table!).

Another local purveyor, Rick’s Picks, featured in a canapé of sesame rice crackers spread lavishly with lime cream cheese and topped with one of the sriracha-habanero pickle slices Rick’s calles Hotties. For one jar of the pickles, I whipped 2 lbs. of cream cheese with the juice and zest of two limes and sea salt to taste, and used two packages of rice crackers. These were so easy, and were exclaimed over: wonderfully complementary flavors.

As for the sweets, I made an Indian almond fudge with cardamom similar to this recipe from Chef In You, but using almond milk instead of the dairy and sucanat instead of white sugar.

But the night’s standouts were, unsurprisingly, chocolate: I made fudgy spiced brownies using Alice Medrich’s recipe, substituting sucanat for the white sugar, and adding 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne, and chopped roasted cashews to the batter; before baking, I topped them with a generous sprinkle of large-flaked sea salt. Notice the recipe has no leavener beyond the eggs – these are fudgy, rich delights.

And that’s it! While a cocktail party featuring a well-curated tableful can be a wonderful thing, sometimes you don’t want to cook all day. Sometimes, you just want to have people over to eat a little, drink more than a little, and upend your couch at 3 a.m. to make the dancefloor bigger.

In that connection, there’s one more party recipe I ought to share: the hangover-remedying bacon sandwich: Fry about 3 strips of bacon per sandwich. Toast bread, and butter one side of each slice. Spread mayonnaise generously on the other side of each slice, pile the bacon high, and dig in! Serve with strong coffee at 2 in the afternoon, then go take out the recycling and mop your floors.

[Cocktail photo from ReeseCLloyd on Flickr]

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