Whether it is the failure of parties in general, or the failure of modern dinners, or the horrible confluence of the two that is to blame is beyond the purview of my rational organ. I wish all dinner party guests at the devil.

A dinner party of any kind is fundamentally an offering of resources. I have these vegetables from my CSA, for example. I have the time and knowledge to prepare these vegetables in an elegant and amusing fashion. I have this table, and tablecloth, and plates, and silverware, and glasses. When I invite my friends, I have done a close calculation on my meager resources to discover if I can offer them without ruining myself. At other times in my life, there has been no tablecloth. But the food has always been good.

I have a painful memory of 2003, practically a lifetime away in so many ways, during the period of my greatest poverty. I had moved to New York without a dime or a job, and my first employment was so unsuccessful I may have personally driven a non-profit into bankruptcy. I didn’t receive wages for two months. If I ate at all, it was somewhat scavenged. I had one friend in the city, a singer I’d known since I was 18. I invited him to join me in my little dinner, having scrounged together a few dollars for pasta and vegetables, to celebrate a new low-wage job I’d gotten. It was all I had to eat for the week, this big pot of pasta, and when it was gone, I would be out of food until my first paycheck. My friend came over and, seeing me take a half a bowl, grabbed the pot and ate it until it was gone. He scraped it with a spoon to make sure nothing remained. What could I do? He was my only friend. After he left, I cried.

Now, my dinner party problems are the opposite. People ask if they can please come to my house for dinner, so I invite them. I spend a whole day, sometimes more, getting ready. I clean the house, set the table, time everything to go into the oven or onto the stove on a precise schedule. I’ve gotten quite good at thinking of courses as a sort of narrative—what flavors will be wanted exactly after this? what do these particular guests desire?—and by evening, everything is exactly in its place, ready to happen. All afternoon, the party was growing. Phone calls all day: Do you mind if I bring my ex-husband? or I heard you were making dinner for So-and-so, and I got jealous! Fine. I’m making all kinds of calculations about how much food there is, how many chairs there are, whether someone will be drinking wine from a highball glass. But fine, I say. I recalculate my resources to decide if I have enough, and I just barely do. I recalibrate my expectations of what I can offer.

Inevitably, five minutes before the party starts, someone is feeling sick and won’t come. The friend shows without the ex-husband, who is shy about new people. The one who invited herself calls—she is too ashamed that she invited herself to come, so she’s just going to drop by for a drink, no food. Half an hour after the party was supposed to start, and dinner getting cold on the stove as we wait, a couple calls to say they haven’t decided what they’re in the mood to have for dinner, so they’ll call in an hour and let me know if they feel like coming. (They went with steak on the grill at home, and it was really delicious, they assure me.)

At times, this results in me sitting with a single friend, dining amid five or six place settings, the table crowded with the specters of people who couldn’t be bothered to walk five minutes to my house. The wise would say that I should either stop caring or stop giving dinners. I should be casual. Casual! Why make everything before guests arrive? Isn’t it more fun to cook and talk with your guests? Then you know for whom you’re really cooking anyway. Bless you who can do that. My mom and I suffer from a similar inability to multitask; cooking with guests already there and chatting with me sounds like cooking while juggling plates on a tightrope. I will definitely hurt myself. And give up making dinner? Are you kidding?

First, I sliced about five small-to-medium potatoes into thin, round slices. I then heated a bunch of olive oil (the cheap kind) in a large skillet, medium-hot flame. You need a fair amount of olive oil — I think the recipe called for a cup and a quarter, and although I didn’t used that much I used a lot. I fried the potatoes until they were soft but not browning, then removed them to a plate lined with paper towels.

In the meantime, I’d cut up a very large onion and six cloves of garlic. Also, because I had a bunch of kale, I cut that up, too. I then sauteed the onions and garlic for a few minutes and added the kale, cooking the whole thing until the onions were pretty translucent and removing them onto paper towels.

I’d been doing this in a a stainless-steel skillet, which was kind of a mistake. If you have a non-stick one, use that. I realized the tortilla would stick to much to the stainless steel, so I switched to a big cast-iron skillet. This turned out to be a good idea. I mixed seven eggs with some salt and pepper in a large bowl, then gently stirred in the potatoes and other veggies. (You don’t want the nice potato disks to break any more than they have to.) I heated about a tablespoon of oil in the cast-iron skillet to just shy of smoking temperature and then poured the eggy mixture into the pan. The idea is to let it cook for a minute on high heat so it won’t stick to the pan, then reduce heat to medium-low for maybe ten more minutes or until the egg is fully set at the edges and starting to set in the middle.

Then you do the thing I was sure wouldn’t work. You hold a large plate on top of the skillet with one hand and invert the pan onto it. (I tried to separate the edges of the tortilla from the sides of the pan with a knife, which I recommend as a prudent procedure.) And verily, the tortilla actually fell cleanly from the pan onto the plate. I then put the pan back on the stove and slid the tortilla into it so the other side could cook, for about five minutes or so, I think. Then the plate trick once again to get the whole thing out of the pan.

I let it cool for ten minutes or so before I ate some. Reader, it was delicious. The kale is perhaps not terribly authentic, but it added a nice bitterness. And the simplicity of the eggs, potatoes, olive oil, salt, and pepper was really apparent. Also, the whole process took maybe an hour, and it made enough for me and my roommate and lots of leftovers. So, the Spanish tortilla: not difficult to make, and very tasty.

So, yesterday was the first day of summer. How did you celebrate? I spent the morning working in the garden. In the afternoon I went for a haircut and ended up getting nearly twelve inches cut off, the most drastic change to my appearance since I was in college. It is exhilarating. I feel free.

Today’s soul food mix is about picnics, the quintessential simple pleasure of summer. Set aside the arguments about inevitable bug bites, sunburn, grit in your food: dining al fresco rocks.

What are your favorite picnic memories? What did you eat? With whom did you share the adventure? What made it special?

Two stand out for me. One is the requisite European baguette-and-bottle of wine story. My friend Ann came to visit me in Rome and we got hopelessly lost somewhere off the Appian Way with little more than some tangerines, a log of goat cheese, and a Swiss Army knife. We made little sandwiches and picked wild thyme to dress them. We drank too much and took a nap in an alfalfa field. One of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.

The other: during the first summer courting my partner, I was determined to impress her with my mad food skills. Inspired by a recent issue of Saveur, I baked chocolate chip cookies, whipped up a raspberry sauce, and layered them into the most sublime ice cream cookie sandwiches in human history. I wrapped them in aluminum foil and froze them solid. The idea was to bring them out with a flourish at the end of our lakeside picnic lunch and blow her mind. “Oh, these? It was nothing.”

Unfortunately, we lost track of time, and by dessert the ice cream sandwiches had melted until they were very difficult to consume, cream and raspberries dripping everywhere. Fortunately, they were still delicious, and we were falling in love.

Download here.

1. Pass The Peas⎯The J.B.’s
2. Cherrystones⎯Eugene McDaniels
3. Memphis Soul Stew⎯King Curtis
4. Grazing In The Grass⎯Friends Of Distinction
5. Pig Knuckles⎯The Morrocco Muzik Makers
6. Cole Slaw⎯Frank “Floorshow” Culley
7. Beans And Cornbread⎯Louis Jordan
8. Hot Sauce⎯Sugarman Three
9. La Tortilla⎯Joe Cuba Sextet
10. Chitlin Con Carne⎯Junior Wells
11. Chicken Shack Boogie⎯Amos Milburn
12. Soul And Sunshine⎯Harvey & The Phenomenals
13. Daily Bread⎯Ike & Tina Turner
14. Let’s Go (It’s Summertime)⎯James Reese
15. Peel Me a Grape⎯Anita O’Day & Cal Tjader
16. Melting Pot⎯Underground Vegetables
17. Roast Duck⎯Lee Perry & The Dynamites
18. Summertime⎯Billy Stewart
19. Blue Skies⎯Jimmy Scott
20. Poison Ivy⎯The Coasters
21. Stoned Soul Picnic⎯The Fifth Dimension

(Catch up on the Soul Food Mix series here.)

Some things have to be enjoyed fresh.

Others are even better the next day.

These tunes have been kicking around the “soul food” folder since the beginning. It’s time to clean out the fridge.

Find the whole meal here.

1. Chocolate Chip (ft. Chip Wickham)⎯The New Mastersounds
2. Philly Dog⎯Mar-Keys
3. Fried Chicken⎯Rufus Thomas
4. Kumquat Kids⎯Eddie Humphrey
5. Peel Me A Grape⎯Shirley Horn
6. Little Green Apples⎯Monk Higgins
7. Cantaloupe Island⎯Herbie Hancock
8. Welfare Bread⎯King Khan & The Shrines
9. Banana Juana⎯Ralph Robles
10. Stump Juice⎯Jimmy McGriff
11. Crab Apple⎯Idris Muhammed
12. Coconut Woman⎯Laurel Aitken
13. Chocolate City⎯Mavis Staples & Curtis Mayfield
14. Vital Juices⎯Funkadelic
15. Blue Juice ⎯Jimmy McGriff
16. Standing In the Grits Line⎯Don Covay
17. Mother Pepper⎯Desmond Dekker
18. Brown Bread⎯Jimmy McGriff

In the fall, a confluence of stressful and unhappy events led me to stop eating properly for a month and I dropped 10 pounds.  A dramatically effective diet, but not one to be recommended.   Weight loss secret: fewer calories = fewer pounds.

Once I got past the stage of food turning to cardboard in my mouth, I realized that I didn’t want to return to my old eating habits.  I’m a relatively healthy eater – relative to the average American – I’m a vegetarian and avoid fast food, sodas etc.  But I realized that I was consuming a fair amount of carbs that I apparently didn’t need and, as I moved into my forties, I was adding a pound or two each year.  All summer, I had thought about losing weight as some of my clothes were getting uncomfortable, but I just couldn’t muster the motivation.  Well, heartbreak has its upsides.

Changing my eating habits has been a fascinating. I’ve always had problems with hypoglycemia or blood sugar crashes – but when I removed the carbs that seemed to get me through the day, I found I could be hungry without feeling fainty and shaky.  So, out of the window goes the obsessive snacking and panicking if I was too far away from food.

I’ve learned to appreciate being hungry – and I say that meaning hungry when one knows one can eat as opposed to the unchosen hunger of many people on the planet.  I can let myself build up an appetite without fear and then really appreciate the flavor of the food that’s waiting for me.

Because I’m consuming fewer calories, I can’t afford to waste them.  I eat a much higher percentage of healthy food.  This also means I’m drinking a tiny bit less, or at least trying to, and my alcohol tolerance has gone down further with the loss of body mass.  Bummer.

I feel more energetic and can’t stand to overeat at a meal, it just leaves me feeling gross and stuffed.  I love weighing myself every morning!  If the numbers edge up, it acts as a daily reminder to eat well.  And yes, I’m saying this out loud, knowing that readers might be horrified at the daily consciousness, but how else does one change ingrained habits?

I have several women friends in a similar age range who are also enjoying losing weight or eating specialized diets…and we all feel a bit self-conscious about making these choices when politically we’re all so horrified at what society does to women’s body image.

But, I’m starting to feel like these highly conscious choices are the only way to avoid the high-fat, processed food that is most easily available in our high-pressure, industrialized society.  To eat a healthy diet, one is almost forced to be obsessive in order to reject the outright unhealthy and the pretend nutrition that surrounds us.  Right?