Shabbat Jamón

A very un-kosher party.

This past Christmas, our friends Walker, Dexter, and Xanthe collectively gifted Hunter and I a jamón ibéríco — a whole leg of cured pork imported from Spain and weighing in at a cool 10-plus pounds. (To prove what a good gift it was, Hunter proposed ordering a jamón from Costco for the gift-swapping summit, thereby forcing Xanthe to spoil the surprise.) Please find enclosed a photo of the happy couple and our ham baby.

Because the jamón was vacuum-sealed, we had time to figure out what to do with it. But because it was also a lot of cured pork, we weren’t going to eat the whole thing ourselves. Between getting married in a few months and a trip abroad the week of Hunter’s birthday, we’re also skipping this year’s edition of the annual pig roast, our traditional pork-a-palooza. So we decided to throw a delayed holiday party of sorts this past Friday and called it Shabbat Jamón, embracing the irony of serving the most traif food imaginable on the Lord’s Day.

Our RSVP list ended up topping 50 — way too big for a dinner party, or even to feed everyone a full meal by ourselves. (The pig roast is its own beast, and takes about a week total of prep and cleanup.) So we took a sort of middle road, inviting guests to bring appetizers and desserts as well as the customary bottle of wine while getting the ball rolling with our own hefty spread. Hunter took the lead on shopping at the Spanish market in the South Bay, so I did most of the cooking during the day.

I’ve watched enough TikToks of private chefs feeding a crowd to know it’s best to get dessert out of the way first. The olive oil cake above is technically Italian, but highlights super-Spanish ingredients like almond and orange. (Almond is an incredibly underrated dessert flavor and I’m here to defend its honor from the “almond mom” stereotype. That licorice-y taste it has in concentrated form is one of decadence, not deprivation!) The brown butter glaze on top is less traditional, if highly photogenic.

This turned out well, although I keep meaning to get an oven thermometer because baked goods keep burning easily even when I compensate by ticking down the suggested temperature by a good 25 degrees. There was only some slight drying at the edges here, but it’s annoying!

These chickpeas were not glamorous, but they were vegan, filling, and cheap — good for bulking out a party spread when you’re panicking about feeding a crowd. I’ve made a version before, and the thickening slurry of bread and almonds (I used panko and some macadamia nuts I’ve had in a drawer forever) is a nifty technique. This also used up a random half-container of tomato sauce we had in the fridge and prompted a restock of our frozen spinach supply. If you’re gonna wilt it down anyway, no reason to go with fresh!

Elsewhere in the freezer, a two-pound bag of shrimp became a skillet of gambas al ajillo after some painstaking work of peeling and deveining, plus chopping to make for more shareable portions. This was basically a pantry meal: the seafood was already on hand, the parsley came from the garden, and all that was needed to finish the dish off were garlic and red wine vinegar. (We didn’t have sherry; don't tell the good people of Iberia.)

By mid-afternoon, Hunter had returned from his sojourn to Harbor City and it was time to assemble some cheese boards — flanked by tinned fish, blood sausage, the results of a blackout at the Whole Foods olive bar, and a couple potato dishes. The Spanish tortilla was obligatory, even if the basically-liquid texture of a proper one continues to evade me, and the patatas bravas are just a bootleg version of the classic Kenji potatoes with a homemade mayo-based sauce. I know it’s annoying to be like “this kitchen appliance will change your life,” but an immersion blender actually will.

At this point, I need to come clean: I did a terrible job taking photos of the jamón, the whole reason the party was happening in the first place. Once guests arrived and Hunter got to carving (with a knife and stand that both came in the box – it’s a whole starter kit), the slices all but disappeared the second they hit the plate. There was never a critical, Instagrammable mass, and to be honest, the knife work was pretty rough, because getting those paper-thin, translucent slivers is a skill the real pros cultivate for years.

Anyway, here’s the whole thing intact. It took multiple tries to screw it in right side up because it’s so slicked in fat the sucker is slippery.

The actual party was the good kind of chaotic: there was a traffic jam of shoes before we successfully communicated it was fine for guests to keep theirs on, some cheese mysteriously ended up on the floor, and I spent yesterday in the grips of an extremely rare hangover. (I barely drink more than a cocktail with dinner, except on a handful of occasions per year.) I’m very grateful to the friends who contributed their own dishes, like Peter’s green gazpacho, or picked up from local mainstays like Porto’s or the Dodger-themed churro car. Most importantly, we ate through all the ham!

Every hosting stint is a learning opportunity, but at this point, our setup is pretty smooth: we had enough stuff on hand we only needed to buy appetizer-size paper plates, firewood, and ice, and our apartment was basically clean by the time we went to bed after midnight. And the leftovers aren’t going to waste, either. As I type this, we’ve got the bone cooking with some beans on the stove.

We’re going to Spain for real in a couple weeks, so all this was good research. Send recs for Madrid and Andalusia if you have them!