Have a snack party. Everyone can eat as much as they please, and you once you sit down to the table, you don’t have to get back up again. Make a bunch of plates, set them all out, encourage eating and drinking, have plenty of water pitchers ready and bottles of wine and then just eat until there isn’t any left. Have someone else bring dessert.
Make caponata, chic peas with leeks and red pepper flakes, fresh fennel with parmesan shavings, string beans with roasted new potatoes and pesto, caramelized onions, miniature semi firm goat cheese rounds, sauted baby artichokes with lemon and mint, a few dried sausages and eggs boiled just until the yolk sets, then smashed a bit and stirred around with a little anchovy, capers and a homemade lemon mayonnaise.
For the caponata, roast everything separately. Cube the eggplant into small pieces, toss with your best olive oil, a little kosher salt, and roast in the oven at 350 degrees. Do the same, all on separate sheet pans, zucchini, red and yellow peppers (you can cook it off in larger pieces and cut afterwards), and red or yellow onions with garlic cloves. When it is all cooked, toss together with black and green olives, a little balsamic, a little fresh lemon juice, some fresh basil, thyme and parsley. Taste for salt and black pepper.
For the chic peas with leeks, slice and saute the leeks slowly in olive oil with one uncut clove of garlic. Toss in a pepperoncino whole, or a few red pepper flakes. Turn off the heat. Add a can of rinsed chic peas.
Taste for salt, pepper, and lemon. If you have a really good balsamic, that can be good as well.
Slice the fennel thinly, toss with olive oil and salt, shave the parmesan with a vegetable peeler and toss together. Also good with lemon if you like.
For the string beans and potatoes, boil the string beans in salted water until tender. Roast the potatoes in the oven, chopped into half inch pieces and seasoned with kosher salt and tossed with olive oil, at 400 degrees until soft and a little brown. Make your favorite pesto and when the vegetables have cooled, toss them together with the pesto until lightly coated. Check for salt and groudn black pepper.
Buy tight, firm artichokes, so small they hardly have a choke at all. Peel off the tough outer leaves, peel the stalk, rub the whole thing with lemon, and slice thinly. Get a frying pan hot and drizzle in some olive oil. Throw in about three or four cloves of garlic and let them sit until they are golden. Add a few fresh mint leaves. Add six or seven artichokes and season with salt and lemon juice.
For the onions, peel the onions and cut off a bit at the bottm so that they can sit flat. Arrange them in a baking dish, drizzle with olive oil, basamic and orange juice. Season with salt. Cover tightly with foil. Bake at 350 degrees until the onions are soft. Uncover and bake for another 10 minutes at 400 until they are caramelized and starting to collapse.