Our year of Saturday dinners
Reporting back on our 2025 resolution
Around this time last year, my husband decided we’d make a 2025 resolution:
Every Saturday we were in town, we’d host people for dinner.
I wrote about it in January:
And gave an update in July:
With the end of the year upon us, some reflection — in the form of a Q&A, because it’s the thing people ask me the most about from this Substack...
Q: So, how’s the dinner thing going?
Great. We did it! We really did host people basically every Saturday in 2025. (With two weekends left to go, we’re booked up.)
There were a few exceptions: We did dinner on Sundays a few times because of holidays or travel, and a few meals or parties were at other people’s homes when we were invited — but if the goal of the resolution was “be proactive and aggressive in order to rebuild community and expand our social life,” then we kept to the spirit of it, 100%.
Q: Was it different people every time? How many people in one night? How did the invites work?
It was different people most times, but there were obviously repeats. (We don’t know that many people.)
Per my husband’s rigorous spreadsheet, with 50 meals done (and two to go), we’ve had 141 adults and 80 kids over to our home this year — if you disregard repeats, it was 78 unique individual adults and 40 unique kids.
They included our neighbors, close friends, colleagues of both mine and my husband’s, people from daycare, people from my big kid’s new school, old friends from college, and more.
Our smallest dinner was just us plus one guest; our biggest was 15 people to eat pork rolls, disco fries, and salt water taffy in a themed meal celebrating my husband’s New Jersey heritage. (It’s a whole thing among a certain friend group.)
More stats, if you care: The average number of people over for dinner in addition to our family was 4.5. Alternatively, we’d average 3 adults and 1.7 children. (Roll with the portions.)
As I described before: We just made a list of everyone we’d want to have over for dinner, then texted out invites. We tried to schedule 4-6 weeks out.
Invites were simple:
“Hey! We’ve got a New Years Resolution to host dinner every Saturday in 2025. Help us keep the streak alive? Free to come over X Y or Z day at 5pm? BYOB.”
If folks couldn’t make one of those dates, we’d move further down the calendar. If two or three families said yes for a certain date, great, big party! If only one person could come, also great! Sometimes it was people who knew each other previously (for example: all families from the same daycare), sometimes it was folks whose only connection was us. We were open to a little bit of chaos.
The week of the dinner, I’d send confirmation texts and confirm dietary restrictions so my husband could plan the menu.
Q: What’d you eat? When did you cook?
Our menus are here. (You’ll notice he’s begun baking his way through Claire Saffitz’s cookbook for desserts; no one is mad about that.)
Guests would be asked to BYOB; occasionally someone might bring something but we never required them to make food.
My husband got into a pretty good rhythm of cooking or prepping some stuff Thursday or Friday night after the kids went to bed; the rest he’d do during naptime (1-3ish) on Saturday before folks came over at 5pm.
Most of the kids who came over were 5 or under; they all got their own plates of fruit, cheese, crackers, and other standard fare for toddlers and pre-schoolers. Some kids would want whatever the grown-ups were eating; some wouldn’t, but we made sure everyone had something.
Q: Do you have a big dining room table? Where do all of you sit?
We do not! Our kitchen table seats 4 comfortably, we can squeeze six if we need, but honestly we only have five adult chairs, plus the high chair for the baby.
If we had more guests than that, we’d sit on our couches or on the floor in our living room (which is in an entirely separate space from the kitchen.)
In the warmer months, we were able to eat on our deck where our table could fit six adults, and kids would eat nearby on the coffee table and then go right inside the door to play or if all the parents were OK with it, watch TV (usually Daniel Tiger, per my big girl’s request.) The summer meals were particularly magical once we figured out this set-up.
Q: Was this expensive?
Well, the cost of groceries has gone up in Trump’s America. But as a family we needed to eat anyway, and it was certainly cheaper than going out to eat (especially if we needed a babysitter) and way less stressful with the kids. Being able to just put the baby down to sleep in her room, grab the monitor, and go back to the table was worth every penny.
Q: Did it really have to be every week?
We found that having the consistency meant it was very easy to invite people. We could just toss out three or four upcoming Saturdays, and if none of those worked, we’d move down the calendar. It wasn’t a negotiation of which day of the week would work, it was just: Every Saturday, 5pm, this is what we do.
It also helped us get into a good routine around cleaning and cooking.
And ultimately, that we were doing it every week for a year forced us by default to expand the invite list beyond our usual suspects.
Q: What if people cancelled? What if someone got sick?
This is where we got a little obsessive — we had a few weeks throughout the year where people would cancel last-ish minute (for good reasons; kids are petri dishes) and instead of just calling it and letting the week go by without a meal, we scrambled to send out last minute invites and find someone else to join us. We couldn’t let the streak die!
If this wasn’t a resolution or we hadn’t committed to the bit, so to speak, we probably wouldn’t have scrambled. But it was always worth it!
Q: How bad was the prep and the clean up?
Not bad at all. The secret is minimum viable cleanliness.
My job was to prep the apartment and I lowered the bar dramatically. Clean bathroom, clean floors, clean tables — everything else was negotiable.
Cleaning up was also pretty straightforward. Our limiting factor was the dishwasher — load it once before we go to bed and then one more time in the morning and then run the vacuum and wipe the tables and we were good to go. The kids have toys everywhere anyway because they’re kids — guests doesn’t really change that part of the chaos.
Q: How do you feel now that 2025 is nearly over? Did the resolution work?
Without hesitation or reservation: Yes.
Our social circle expanded dramatically. We actually made new friends! As adults! With tiny kids! A year in, there are people in my life who last year I would’ve called acquaintances and now I call friends.
It was an excellent forcing mechanism for booking quality time with people and for getting off my phone for a few hours.
We have a broader and deeper community because of this effort. Breaking bread (or tacos) with others is a tradition going back millennia for a reason: To share a meal is to share time, vulnerability, and sometimes chaos with others.
I do a lot of interviews and podcasts for work and at some point this year, I was asked what I recommend folks to besides running for office or volunteering for local campaigns. My go-to answer became: Host people over for dinner. (Brunch is also OK!)
In fact, I might go so far as to say that having dinner with friends 52 weekends in a row is the most political thing I did in 2025.
I don’t say that lightly. I’m a professional political operative! I spend most of my waking hours recruiting and supporting candidates for office and even outside of my work, I voted in two elections (thanks NYC!), donated money to campaigns and causes I believed in, subscribe to lots of local and independent media, and participate in political discourse.
And yet: as Garrett Bucks puts it: Building “caring, humane infrastructure” is political. There’s a reason there’s been so much discourse this year about building community, or as Katherine Goldstein calls it, “deep casual hosting.”
To get to know your neighbors and build deeper more meaningful relationships is what enables us to not just survive this era but possibly even thrive in and after it.
I wrote back in the summer that I’ve had to get over keeping score or expecting to be invited back. That’s still mostly true. It’s okay. Some people are inviters, some are invitees. Such is life.
Q: So what are you going to do in 2026?
We are going to try and keep it going into the new year. (We’re already booked a few weekends of January and February.)
However, we decided to let go of the compulsion to book every weekend or scramble if there are holes or last minute gaps. Generally we’ll keep inviting people over for dinner and hoping they say yes. We’re not going to stress it if there’s a Saturday afternoon without guests planned.
It’s fun, it fills the time (especially in the winter) and for now, even in that hour or so on Saturday afternoon when the food seems like it won’t be done in time and the apartment isn’t quite ready and we really wish we could just back out, I’m always so so so glad we don’t.
Q: Any advice for someone who wants to do something similar in 2026?
Just do it. It might be chaos. Something will go wrong. You might have a bad (or less perfect) night once in a while. That you know there’ll be another dinner six days later relieves any single night from carrying the burden of being the best night ever. Operate from a place of abundance: We get to have lots of best nights.
For more practical how-to-do it advice: You can pick up a copy of When We’re in Charge in any format you’d like — hardcover, e-book, or audio book (narrated by yours truly) anywhere you get books, including Amazon or Bookshop.org or literally anywhere else. If you have Spotify Premium, you can listen to for free right this very minute.
Another option: Get your book along with an excellent I DO NOT DREAM OF LABOR tote bag at the Crooked Media shop.
The point about accepting that some people are inviters and some are invitees without keeping score is probbaly the hardest part but also the most freeing. I tried somethign similar a couple years back and got hung up on reciprocity until I realized the value wasn't transactional. The minimum viable cleanliness approach is also key, honestly half the battle is just lowering the activation energy to make it happen. One thing that helped me was treating it like a recurring meeting where the agenda is just vibes and food, which makes it feel less precious and more sustainable over time.
I love this, and as the resident cook of my household I would love a guest post from your husband talking about the menu design process!! Some beautiful ideas from your spreadsheet I may be tempted to steal in the new year…