Tea-ny tiny

In our world of cell phones and text messaging, on Saturday I was touched to watch my niece Rebecca pick up the home phone, squint up at a list of phone numbers on the wall to find the number of her neighbor friends, then dial and invite them to our tea party at 12:30.

Oh, it was so fun. Everyone put on their dresses, brushed their hair, and arrived promptly for tea, which turned into a bit of a luncheon. My niece (on the right) nailed the part of dainty tea drinker. Doesn't she look like a 1930s deb?

Okay, so I kind of forgot how tiny this tea set was. But who cares when it means you can have 4 refills of our special tea? We had tea sandwiches, fruit salad, brownies AND cupcakes, which we made with homemade buttercream frosting earlier that morning together, in four different colors, per Rachel's request.

I taught them how to hold out their pinkies, and even without my suggesting they use their finest manners, they politely asked each other to pass various items around the table. I humored them by offering, "More tea, mademoiselle?"

So sweet.

And you remember how I mentioned the spilling stuff on the tablecloth thing in my last post? While I wasn't looking, these sweet children spilled sugar all over the tablecloth. They didn't even try to hide it. "We had a little accident," one of them said as I stood in the kitchen, preparing the fruit salad. William was suddenly at my side, asking for a napkin to clean it up. So civilized, these children!

And what a good sport, that William. But when your aunt is letting you drink pure sugar to wash down the brownies, cupcakes and peanut butter and jelly, you'd probably put up with a bunch of girls, too.

Kindred spirits

Starting around age 12, I developed an obsession with tea parties. I thus formed The Tea Party Guild, which also speaks to another healthy obsession I had with my Roget's Thesaurus. I came up with the name after looking up synonyms for "group." I considered "society," "gathering," and then ultimately decided on "guild" for the simple reason that it made me think of the Lollipop Guild in the Wizard of Oz. Which is a ridiculous leap, especially when you consider that I was truly aiming to be like Anne of Green Gables. I wanted nothing more than to gather my kindred spirits, use big words I didn't quite understand yet, and have an occasional afternoon of all things fanciful. If we happened to spill a little tea on the nice table cloth, launching us into an elaborate scheme to clean it before an adult noticed that evolved into a complicated web of not-so-clever cover-ups that ultimately led us to being caught red-handed, so be it. It would be such an Anne situation. And believe me, at that age, whatever I could do to be more like Anne Shirley, I did it (though I never found myself in any particular sticky situation).
"It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?" Oh Anne, you're adorable.

Fortunately, I had 4 very close girlfriends at the time who bought into my love of Green Gables and tea parties, and boy, oh boy, did we have fun. We dutifully rotated hostess responsibilities from house to house, and for each party we wore dresses andhats. I even scored a pair of short gloves from the old Emporium in Boise. As part of the guild membership, we banded together each Friday in wearing dresses and hats. Looking back, I'm not sure whether I was more blessed to have friends who did this with me, or classmates who did not ridicule us to our faces.

For our tea parties, we generally stuck to the simple Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings variety packs, but we also made goodies, like those fancy crustless tea sandwiches with cucumber and cream cheese, not to mention sweets like lemon bars, merigues, you name it. My parents had the perfect antique-y dining room, too, with plenty of mismatched tea cups featuring dainty gold embellishment. My mom helped by ironing one of her nicest table cloths, and even boiled the water for us once we had sat down adn began chatting (though don't think the trappings of the occasion were any indication of civilized grown-up talk; close your eyes and you could just as easy picture girls standing around their lockers, gossiping about crushes and who's going through puberty fastest).

ALL THIS IS TO SAY, I gave my 10-year-old niece a tea set that she could paint herself as a birthday present, and it is now all decorated and ready to use. She has requested a tea party on Saturday. We're spending the better party of the morning and afternoon together and my mind is already swooning with ideas of all the things we can bake and assemble and talk about. I am so excited, feeling like I was born to be an aunt with nieces to have tea parties with.

I. Can't. Wait.

What shall I give you?

Here are your options:

1. Two rotting pumpkins on the porch steps

2. A one-pound bag of dirty Kleenex

3. Expertly stacked (empty) mini boxes of Junior mints

4. Vegetable soup I've eaten so much of I can hardly stand the sight of it (and there's so much left...gah)

5. A photo taken before the sickness took over, displaying the only Halloween costume I've put any effort toward in the last 10 years.


Option 5, you say? Fine by me!

Casserole: the verb

What dish deserves its own event?

Answer: The casserole, of course. And an event it got.

To be perfectly honest, I was a little worried that planning a gathering of this feastable magnitude would only lead to a let-down afterward for not living up to the high expectations we'd set in our minds. I remember that feeling when I was younger when my party planning entailed glorious mental images of endless laughter, puffy paint, ghost stories, snacks, sodas, movies, fun music and staying up till sun-up - the reality being that we all fell asleep by, like, 10 p.m., while watching a movie.

We had been planning this party for literally 2 months, right after we made the discovery that we all shared this guilty pleasure for canned soup with pick-your-vegetable, cheese and crunchy topping. I tried my best to keep myself from imagining a table overflowing with hot pads, serving spoons a dishes of varying sizes containing steaming, creamy delights, with people standing around it in wonder and amazement. Or drink stations around the kitchen to offer the social lubrication needed to loosen our dance joints and aid us in enjoying a game or two, causing us to hoot and holler.

I blocked those ideas from my mind and just decided to just let the thing happen, casserole style.

Do you see how appropriate that was? The casserole is basically the easiest dish ever, designed to quickly fill the tummies of you and the rest of your army. You can try to make it more difficult, but we all know that in the end, you're just going stir something together and plop it in a dish and bake it. It's not a dish to worry about - it comes out every time.

So all we had to do, in theory, was to provide the place and invite the known casserole lovers to bring their casseroles (and a little booze), and our party would be set.

I'll take this opportunity to mention that a casserole never suffers from throwing in a few last-minute ingredients. Corn and cheese are great examples. Also great for describing what else got thrown in during the final hours of party-prepping, such as the embroidered souvenir "Casserole King" t-shirt for our friend Jeffy (oops, forgot to take that picture) and a couple games (which weren't as cheesy as they were brilliant).

When the guests began parading in with their hot dishes, the magic happened. It all turned out. The party totally casseroled. What else do I need to say here? I think I've gone on far too long about it. My lack of photos only speaks to the amount of fun I had - here's practically the only photo I managed to pause to take.

In case you wondered...

This was the finished deal. Pret-ty rich, difficult to slice, but fun.