Three Years?!?!

Three years!?!? Yep, it was January, 2010 that I decided to make pasta from scratch. Being single, I sometimes find it hard to justify spending a bunch of time and money cooking for just myself. So, not wanting my efforts to go to waste, I invited a few friends over to share in the pasta. My original thought was to just have 6-8 people over for food, wine and conversation. If things went well, I would try to make it a monthly event.

Well that germ of an idea led to 3 years of monthly gatherings with as few as 8 people and as many as 27 people all sharing in the common love of food and friends. I wanted to do the dinners on an evening each month that would generally work for the most people so I picked Sunday. Then I decided the fourth Sunday would work well for most months. Next, what would I call these dinners? Well, how about an acronym? So FoSaP or the Fourth Sunday at Paula's was born. I do all the cooking and serving but many guests bring wine or booze or in some other help out. I really appreciate that.

My goal has been to do something each month that is new to me. For instance, make pasta from scratch, grind and stuff sausages, make tamales, things of this sort. Many times I found the effort and energy worthy of a fantastic dining experience, but other times I found that the commercially produced item was better and often times cheaper. Two things in particular that stand out were tortillas and french bread.

The most amazing thing is that I never seem to run out of ideas for these dinners. Sometimes it's a particular food item that I will focus on like chocolate or corn. Other times it's a cuisine. Many times I see something on a cooking show that will spark my interest and then I'm off and running. I have found incredible cookbooks from the library, amazing videos from YouTube, and my favorite recipe website at www.food.com (formerly recipezcar). Now that Pinterest is starting to take the internet by storm, I've even browsed that site as well for inspiration.

To celebrate three years of these dinners, I created a cookbook with the recipes used or anticipated each month. I started on it about 6 months ago and was really worried I wouldn't get it together in time for the anniversary but I did it! Unfortunately the cost to print and bind the books was just too much to offer them to each household but I did print two of them so people could look them over. I gave these two away as gifts and everyone else got a booklet with the first 14 or so pages (cover, acknowledgement, introduction and table of contents) and a disc with the pdf file of the book. This way people could view and/or print whatever struck their fancy.

Probably the one weakness I have with these dinners is taking photos. I'm usually busy fixing, prepping, or finishing up and forget to get the camera out. If I were really going to put together a cookbook that is one thing I really need to focus on.

I was so happy to create and share these books with everyone. These friends have brought so much joy to my life that I just couldn't imagine not having them in it. I only wish I could have offered a fully printed copy of the book to each person. Maybe if I win the lottery.....