/uncommons/

I've come to associate summer in Oregon not with heat, but with tempestuousness. This time last year I was building snowmen by the side of Crater Lake. While my parents were here last week, it was Maryland levels of hot. And this week, it's been nothing but showers and two sweater weather. I should probably be sacrificing more goats to the thunder gods.

Yesterday the storms cleared for a gorgeous afternoon of white-rice-plump clouds, the sun as bright as a golden quail yolk resting atop a bed of tobiko, with a slight breeze as crisp as the cool saké served at Bamboo. (I might still be dreaming of that sushi.) I went with a group of the lingering members of /uncommons/, the supper club I'm a part of at Reed, and the planning for our upcoming event menu was accomplished in twenty minutes--we four women were nothing if not efficient. The rest of the evening was an unbroken stream of magical conversation, interspersed with round after round of magical plates: river-fresh nigiri, sweet pork belly steam buns, wagyu brisket so soft it melted on the tongue, inari...the sauce from the 'potato killer' imo koroshi was so fingerlickin' good that we stubbornly kept a piece of yam on the plate so they wouldn't clear the dish and thus rob us of the sauce.

More than anything, though, the night was a reminder of why I'm so grateful to have met these girls in the first place. If I'd never joined /uncommons/--by mere chance, total coincidence, during an alumni event--my life would be so different right now. It seems weird, but it's been a total game-changer to have people around as--and even more--obsessed with cooking as I am; it makes me feel saner by comparison. These people are amazing individuals, and we never would have met were it not for food.

I'll try to save myself from going all Mrs Ramsay on you, but a dinner shared between friends, with candlelight and a killer playlist? Irreplaceable. Every few weeks over the course of the semester, we prepare a seven to eleven course meal for a dozen students, chosen by lottery. Days and dozens of emails go into planning the dishes, which are grouped around a unifying theme--anything from 'comfort' to 'seafood' to 'rupture'--and then served at seven pm on Saturday evenings. Every once in a while we throw in a brunch for good measure.

I've hosted dinner parties for my friends before and I love doing it, yet there's an added dimension when more than one person is executing a menu--less stress, more fun, more creativity, more shoulders to lean on when a dish fails or you, say, start a grease fire with oil you were boiling for deep-fried poached eggs. Hours spent in the kitchen shucking oysters or using oyster shuckers to cut open limes for impromptu, the fire-department-is-in-our-parking-lot-and-we-have-to-serve-fifteen-people-outside tequila shots--they're the hours binding us together in butter stains and knife cuts.

It's reflective of our devotion to these dinners that even though our last meal went horribly wrong in a few ways--we mistakenly invited three extra diners, a pot melted into a nugget of aluminum on the stovetop, there was that grease fire--despite all this, everyone still wanted the meal to go on. The first thing I asked the firefighters when they showed up was whether I could get my gougères out of the oven; what oysters were left continued to be shucked (along with a few limes and, uh, a fifth of tequila); the rabbit confit was extracted from its protective six-cup coating of bacon fat.. Once the little red truck cleared out, we were able to serve every dish, with some minor modifications (no thanks, ammonium-dusted eggs in salade lyonnaise) outside on some beat-up couches and a picnic table. Despite the fact that we had to scrub fire extinguisher goo from the cabinets, it was great. We survived, with only third-degree burns.

This post was going to be about washoku, or balance (I had this great segue planned from the sushi meal and everything) but it's turned out to be about a different kind of balance altogether, one that has literally put me through fire. Thanks, guys.