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There is no grocery website that delivers to my ZIP code, so fresh vegetables are hard to come by--thank goodness. I find the very sight of raw broccoli and cauliflower on a buffet table dispiriting. I don't go to parties looking to balance my diet with the four major food groups or to consume the recommended daily allowance of fiber. For my own soiree, I hit Cajun Joey's Specialty Foods cajun-joeys.com) where sugar is the fifth major food group. Joey hasn't met a vegetable that can't be mashed, pureed, creamed or souffleed--Beechnut meets Le Cirque. The carrots, corn, spinach and artichokes looked great and ended up tasting like candy. I was thrilled.
I can't pinpoint just when the task of foraging for food on the Web finally began to overwhelm me. It might have been when I found out that because of the law in Washington, the wine would take at least ten days for delivery. But wait...fast delivery was possible to West Virginia. The political columnist in me wanted to know why: the power of Senator Robert Byrd? Some anomaly in the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? But the Martha Stewart in me just wanted the wine. A round trip to West Virginia would take more time than I had left, yet I needed a case of Merlot to ensure that my guests were less than keenly sensitive to the cellophane and cardboard from which their meal had so recently been liberated. I needed a way around the Rules. What if I could find a local store with a website but faxed the order? My seven years covering the Clintons were coming in handy. How do I get a case of wine to my doorstep by Saturday? Don't ask, don't tell.
The trouble didn't necessarily end with delivery. When I sampled the beef Wellington, although remarkably juicy and delicious, I realized it wasn't going to slice cleanly into pieces suitable for lap dining (fearful everyone would be busy during Washington's party-gridlock season, I had let the guest list swell to an sro crowd of 30). I was worried enough to e-mail my editors in New York City: How about a back-up ham, that mainstay of Irish funerals? "Boring," they replied.
But not as boring as going hungry. Dinner by committee was my worst idea yet. Through Jeeves, I reached the Smithfield Collection smithfield-companies.com/collection) and despite the pretentious name for a company that slaughters pigs, I got delivery of a crusty, honey-soaked ham in an ice chest left under the porch, per my instructions, in one day's time.
At this point, I realized I needed a real-life Jeeves. Who better to serve food with snootiness sufficient to obscure its Internet provenance? Ironically, my virtual Jeeves couldn't produce a human one. He did tell me of a school in the Netherlands where I could "learn the true art of butling." Smarty pants. I located a domestic agency in Beverly Hills on my own, but its best price for a footman in a morning coat was $500, minimum. In a panic, I had our bureau administrator, Judith Stoler, call the caterer she uses for TIME functions, which, by the way, has an online site. A waiter would come on Sunday night. Was this breaking the rules? Let's just say there's no controlling legal authority.