Weeks 4 & 5

I was beginning to miss hosting dinner parties like I had when I lived in MTL.  Living within a four block radius of all my best friends, I would go weeks, even months without eating dinner by myself.  Whether or not my friends enjoyed cooking themselves, they were consistent and loyal proponents of my cooking, more than happy to be my lab rats.  Now that I'm back in Toronto, my friends, who are either working or in grad/law school, live all over this massive city.  Whereas I live downtown, which I wouldn't trade for anything, most of my friends live in either North York or the dreaded Thornhill (I'm not the biggest fan of suburbia).  Gathering everyone together for a meal at my place then, is obviously more difficult than it once was.  Either way, I was convinced that I was ready to host my first Culinary School inspired dinner, and invited about 16 people, of which 12 r.s.v.p.-ed.
On the last Friday of September, I woke up at about 7 a.m. to get started on my prep work.  I had come up with what I thought was a brilliant idea: making homemade ravioli with an osso buco filling.  Sounds good, doesn't it? And it was tasty, I can assure you of that, but worth all the trouble? That is still to be determined.
Anyways, so I began, at 7 a.m., to make the osso buco, which had to be braised in the oven at 350 for about 2 hours.  I had purchased 8 massive veal shanks, knowing that that would provide plenty of meaty filling.  In the end, there was actually enough extra meat to serve alongside the ravioli.  Once the veal was cooked and falling off the bones, rather than straining out and disposing of the mirepoix, I actually saved it to mix in with the meat filling, to not only give it extra flavour, but to act as a sort of binding agent.  I broke up about 3/4 of the meat with my hands in a bowl, mixed in the leftover mirepoix, and added 2 egg yolks.
With the meat filling being done at about noon, I went on to prepare the hors d'oeuvres.  I had a left over package of ready-made puffed pastry (while I may be adventurous I am certainly not ready to make my own) and topped it with a brunoise of cremini mushrooms (fried in a pan with rosemary, garlic, and a nob of butter to add flavor and remove the moisture) and thin slices of Brie cheese.  It was quite the hit with my hungry guests, and bought me some time to manage the nightmare I had brought upon myself with the raviolis. 
Thank god my best friend Rachel came over early in the afternoon to both keep me company and offer a helping hand.  While I am usually hesitant to accept any outside help (I'm sooo neurotic in the kitchen that I don't trust anyone with my culinary visions), I learned that using a pasta machine to thin out the dough I had previously kneaded was most certainly a two-person job.  I thinned the pasta into long strips for my ravioli, and, in fear that they would dry out before I got around to filling them, I placed them in layers with damp paper towel.  BAD IDEA...
The pasta stuck to the paper towel and took forever to remove!!!!!! cost me quite a bit of time. 
When I was finally finished make all the ravioli, once again a really time consuming and arduous task, I reduced the veal stock and made a sauce.  When everyone had arrived and was ready to eat I began boiling 3 pots of water to cook the pasta.  May I lend some advice: DON'T MAKE HOMEMADE RAVIOLI FOR 12 PEOPLE! It is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to boil it all at the same time, as the raviolis will just stick together.  as a result, my guests were served all at different times and thus instructed to eat when they got their food (quite an amateur move).  To top it all off, in an effort to relieve some of my stress, a helper placed one of my plates of uncooked raviolis on the fourth burner that wasn't turned on.  The heat from the other burners being on caused all of the raviolis on the plate to stick together like glue!! My plate of hard work was as good as garbage and my guests, rather than getting 8 raviolis each, were left with 5 or 6, and I only got 3!
Although my friends, who are incredibly nice and grateful, kept assuring me that my dinner party was indeed a success, I saw it as more of a failure.  Lessons were certainly learned, and although my osso buco raviolis were quite superb, I will, in the future, only make them when hosting 4-6 people maximum!
To be continued...