plans and resolutions

The plan for New Year’s Eve was simple: dinner with some friends at Angela and Marco’s place and that’s about it.

As it’s standard for us, there were a lot of declaration for this year to be different, for the dinner to be kept simple and minimal and no overdo in food and wine.
As it’s standard for us, things didn’t exactly go according to the plan. Pity, because this year the plan looked rock solid.

Marco, being Marco, started planning in advance: he set up a whatsup group chat to organize everything.
As 31st got closer, Marco also created an excel file with a split of all the food, drinks, cutlery, etc. and who was in charge of cooking what and who was bringing which wine.
It was during the sending of the excel file and the replies to the mail, that things started spiraling out of control, just a little.

Paola declared that Antonio had to bring cheese even though it wasn’t in the list, because he was bringing it back from his hometown in Puglia.
Angela expressively forbade Paola to bring dried fruits. So Paola arrived with some small bags of Brazilian nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, the more the merrier.
She also brought 2 (or were they 3?) cotechino even though she knew that we were going to eat only one of them.

I volunteered to bring the salad. "Oh and yeah", I added, "I’ll bring an extra bottle of prosecco, cause you never know."

I did my groceries on New Year’s Eve morning. I did look a bit out of place in the supermarket as I wasn’t buying any of the typical food that are part of the traditional Eve’s dinner (some other people were doing that in another supermarket about the same time): I was trying to buy the right amount of vegetables for a small salad for 7 people. I thought I did quite well: 4 big peppers, 3 fennels, 1 kg of carrots and 1 kg of cherry tomatoes.

Marco greeted me on the kitchen door; he’s wearing a green apron and he temporarily stopped opening oysters to tell me to put all the veggies straight out on the balcony: we don’t need any salad, there’s no way we’re going to eat it, there’s already too much stuff anyway.

He was right, obviously. So when I got back home later on in the early morning, I was carrying 4 big peppers, 3 fennels, 1 kg of carrots and 1 kg of cherry tomatoes back to the flat with me.
Alongside “some”rocket salad (around half a kilo), walnuts, pistachios, lychees and a whole bag of oranges and clementines.
Basically I won’t need to buy anything to eat for the next week. I also think we should really take my plan “let’s just order pizza” more seriously for the next New Year’s Eve dinner. This is a good resolution for the new year.