Mini pizzas with thyme and garlic cream cheese

I think what some people don’t realize is that party food and dinner food are two completely different animals.  The difference goes beyond superficial looks or serving style.  I have a completely different approach when it comes to making appetizers for a party than I do for a sit-down dinner.  (They do have the same admirable goal though: presenting your guests with something that tastes super yummy.)  With a sit-down dinner, the cook has a lot more room to dictate.  She or he can tell people exactly when the food is ready to be eaten, and she or he can coerce people to come to table and start eating right away, when the food is at its optimal yumminess.  At the table, the food is kind of the star.  There’s a moment at the beginning of every sit-down meal where everyone is silent, with their heads turned down to their plates.

Party food, on the other hand, isn’t revered in the same way.  Party food is more of an afterthought, taking a bit of  a backseat to the mingling, the drinking, and the entertainment.

I used to approach party-food like a sit-down dinner, which led to a lot of disappointments.  It’s really hard and unreasonable to make your guests all grab the finger food at the same time and eat the food when it’s still perfect and piping hot.  When that doesn’t happen, stuff turns soggy and/or gross, and that’s disappointing.

Also, it’s a HUGE pain in the butt to spend an entire day cooking a whole bunch of different things only to be completely exhausted and antisocial when the party rolls around.

Therefore, to me, party food needs three main characteristics:

1. It doesn’t need to be hot to be tasty and it won’t deteriorate if it hangs around, out of people’s mouths, since food at parties will sit and sit and sit and people will graze and graze and graze.

2. It can be broken up into steps and made ahead of time.  On the day of, I just like doing the composing—putting the pieces together.  The bulk of it is already done.

3. This goes without saying, but people shouldn’t need forks, spoons, or knives to eat the food.

I decided to make mini pizzas because, hello, pizza happens to taste pretty good when it’s cold!  The only potentially icky bit about that is the congealed semi-translucent cheese that you see with cold pizza, so I decided to eliminate melted cheese and go with a cream cheese spread instead, which can totally hang out at room temperature and not start looking funky because of it.

A mini pizza also needs to pack a wallop because it’s so small and there’s only one or two bites to make an impression.  I decided to use a tomato and onion jam as the red sauce and slices of cured meat as fun unexpected things that make people go, “Oh, this isn’t pepperoni and cheese, but it’s familiar enough that I like it!”

Because the composed ingredients on a mini pizza sit around in sub-optimal conditions, it’s not necessary to go with the best of the best or to go 101 miles in your efforts.  Party food is mixing convenience with quality, I think. You can use store-bought pizza dough, for instance (I did!).  You can freeze par-baked dough until the day of your party.  You can store pre-made onion jam and the cheese spread in the fridge until you’re ready.  Then on the day of, all you have to do is compose the mini pizzas and toss them in the oven for just a little bit.   And it’s not imperative that people eat them right way.  They can just hang around, chilling like a bunch of villains. And they will still be super yummy.  And it will be super killer that you’re not just serving chips and dip.