My friend Emily throws the very best theme parties. In college, she dreamed up ideas and organized them miraculously into being, such as when her urge to throw a Chanukah-themed golf party led us to making latkes for twenty. Always a stick in the mud, I groused about how annoying all that damn potato-grating would be, but Emily saw the big picture: that after nine rounds of holiday drinks at nine different campus locations (including Jello shots at the library—oh, college!) nobody, not even yours truly, would care that the apartment would smell like hot oil for weeks. And you know what? I didn’t.

In fact, it’s times like those that I look back on fondly, especially now that Emily’s packed her boxes and moved to a tiny New York City apartment. Right up until her departure this summer, she was planning get-togethers for everybody still in town, always with a creative twist. Case in point: to commemorate the arrival of Top Chef in D.C., she invited us over for a series of potlucks, with the stipulation that our contributions would be (in true Top Chef fashion) part of a challenge. The first night, we made foods that somehow represented our home cities; I explained my salted butter caramel ice cream as being a dessert-ified version of the classic Chicago caramel corn from Garrett’s. At the height of World Cup fever, we brought over dishes inspired by the countries that made it to the final four. I chose Germany.

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My fingernails and cuticles may be safe from worried biting, but I do have nervous habits like anyone else—and my listmaking compulsion is an especially stubborn one. Deadlines, accomplishments, ideas? Bullet-point them! Write them down! We may be talking about something ridiculously trivial or seriously important, looming or faraway, but if it crosses my mind, it usually gets transcribed on a Post-It. What can I say? I like to organize my thoughts.

Until recently, I’ve been engaging in some public list-making as I shared my weekly CSA recap with you kind souls. This summer brought my first encounter with a farmshare program, and the recap was a vehicle for all sorts of things: exchanging veggie-centric ideas, asking questions, complaining, and doing a little dance whenever an experimental recipe worked out. Most of all, I detailed my CSA adventures to convince myself that I could rise to the challenge. For someone who used to come home from the office too tired to toast bread, the prospect of extensive weeknight cooking was daunting.

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As an ethnic Jew with no serious investment in the religion, Chanukah means one thing to me, and one thing only: latkes! In college, I had a wonderful roommate who, having also fallen from the graces of the Tribe, shared my latke-centric outlook on the holiday. One year, she suggested we spread the love to our friends, most of whom had attended Catholic schools growing up and needed to learn the way of the latke. We would throw a Chanukah party! This was all fine and good until she revealed that her proposed guest list was twenty names long. That meant twenty latke-gobbling humans in our apartment, shoveling potato pancakes into their maws as fast as we could fry them up.

It didn’t turn out to be the epic disaster I’d vehemently sworn it would be. Nevertheless, four pounds of potatoes into our preparation, I was casting evil glares in her direction as I bloodied my knuckles over a washboard grater, the pile of potatoes turning an unappetizing shade of gray as they were exposed to air. Unsurprisingly, I haven’t made a latke since.

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