such enticing section headings

As one might expect, the high point of the festivities was to be a party, involving seventy guests, coolers crammed with beer and wine, white lights strung from the back deck, a rousing lip-sync performance of the Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It to the Streets” by yours truly (a special request from Sarah, who loves to exercise my talent for remembering easy-listening lyrics), a bonfire on the “beach” (the former site of our childhood sandbox and aluminum swing set), and of course, a generous spread on the dining room table. In the preceding weeks, Katie and her boyfriend Andrew had dutifully tasted and tested wines, and we exchanged a flurry of e-mails and phone calls, carrying out the menu-planning ritual that that lays the groundwork for any proper family event. With minimal haggling, it was decided that three sides of salmon, grilled and painted with pesto, would be sufficient, along with chicken sausages; Tina’s trademark corn salad; a green salad with candied pecans, sliced cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes; crudités; an assortment of cheeses; blue and yellow corn chips; and salsa. Most importantly, however, there would be an uncommonly luscious white bean hummus, a recipe created by a Little Family within our little family, a subdivision official enough to require capitalization.

In 2004, when Katie spent several months living in Boston with Sarah and Sarah’s husband Jim,* the three came to call themselves the “Little Family,” both for the size of their household and for the stature of its female members, and for Christmas that year, they assembled The Little Family Cookbook, a compilation of some of the dishes they prepared during those months together. “We did a lot of cooking, a lot of eating, and some might say a lot of drinking,” they explain. “In these pages we share with you the fruits of our labors and the grapes and malts we paired them with.” Full of vibrant color photos, beverage suggestions, and such enticing section headings as “White Beans, White Beans Everywhere!”; “We Love to Coook Indian”; “Baa-Baa Yummy Lamb”; and “Slow Cook This,” it can be hard to decide where to begin. But the white bean hummus—unusually smooth and creamy, with the airiness of whipped cream—isn’t a bad starting point, or even springboard for, say, an entire party.