Emily Peet-Lukes
Wine X Online edition
It’s Friday night, and the girls are coming over for a much-needed night of wine, laughter, and food. It’s been a hard year for everyone and now that the friends are vaccinated you can put an end to those tragic zoom happy hours and finally gather together in person.
As a good hostess you go to the store to acquire all the supplies for the evening: a bottle of Prosecco to cheers with, a few bottles of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, a nice Pinot Noir along with a more-than-decent Cabernet Sauvignon, and some local IPA’s for the friend who only drinks beer. Next, you wander the store deciding what you should serve for food. You have a couple of photos with recipes pulled up on your Pinterest: Caprese skewers, puff pastry spinach and feta swirls, bacon-wrapped blue cheese stuffed dates, and a giant charcuterie board that looks like a high-end art piece.
The recipes are toted as “easy” but include ingredients that aren’t often on hand, and your grocery cart quickly fills up with spreads, dips, chips, french bread, high-quality cured meats, and pounds upon pounds of fancy expensive cheeses: crumbled feta, balls of fresh mozzarella, triple cream brie, extra sharp Irish cheddar, vibrant manchego, creamy goat cheese, salty pecorino romano, and the list goes on.
With your cart filled to the brim, you stroll down the frozen food aisle on your way to check-out, stopping to ponder the enticing and truly easy selections of pre-made frozen goods: mini-corn dogs, jalapeño poppers, quiches, bagel bites, and sweet potato fries. All ready to eat with the help of an oven or microwave, no food processors or pinches of saffron, or the need for a large wooden board and a degree in visual arts. But alas, you keep walking because bagel bites will look awful in the Instagram photos while the cheeseboard will be your most important work of art to date.
The cashier scans your items, the cheeses tallying up the total much higher than necessary for a girls’ night happy hour, you wince slightly at the final amount, but stand committed and with the swipe of a visa, your Pinterest perfect visions are about to come true.
Later that evening and with hours of cooking and preparation under your belt, the food looks decent enough, the wine is chilled and you’re exhausted. The girls begin to arrive and oggle at your spread, pouring hefty glasses of wine and fingering the nuts that lay strategically across the heavy wooden board. You watch intently as people dance around your creation, trying your best not to burst out instructions like “the mango chili chutney works best with the goat cheese and flaxseed cracker!” or “try the brie WITH a couple of grapes!” but instead you hold back with the calmness and grace of a person serving bagel bites and not $250 of meat and cheese.
The night continues in blissful friendship, laughter flows as wine bottle corks pop and the pounds of cheeses are consumed in increasingly barbaric ways. You sit back in your chair, tipsy and bloated, pleased with how the evening is going, wanting desperately to undo the button on your jeans, well… take them off, put on sweats, chug Pepto Bismol and lay on the couch in the fetal position while watching reality television and hoping for some sweet gastrointestinal relief to wash over you. Girls’ nights are fun and charcuterie boards are beautiful, “but at what cost?” you ponder to yourself.
The monetary and physical ramifications of a fad based around glutenous amounts of meat and cheese on a heavy wooden board are enough to throw someone over the edge, and our only hope is that someday soon a new appetizer fad will take over and replace the charcuterie board. Maybe something just as photographable but easier on the gut and the wallet. The least we can do to each other is to acknowledge that the charcuterie board is actually eating US out of house and home and must be stopped. Once defeated we will all be able to sit back comfortably without the help of antacids and take a moment to laugh at the old photos of us and these giant boards of meat and cheese, reminiscing on the silliness of the days of the past, parties full of laughter, friendship, and unnecessary IBS.
