The constantly expanding shabbat table

Wednesday night after the Daily Show before we both went to bed--
rob: we dond't have shabbat plans do we?
zach: don't think so. should we invite a few people over for shabbat dinner?
rob: yeah, we'll keep it small it'll be chill.
zach: sounds good.

I made one invitation call, so did rob.
Eli and Kavitha could come. Jon was planning on going hiking, so that brought us up to 4.
Ari A could come, so that made 5. Good people good times. I invited my cousin Noah who is in town for the summer, 6. Ari's friend Miriam was interested, 7. Josh Luckens e-mailed to inquire as to my shabbat plans, delighted to see him we asked him to join us, 8. Hmm, Jon decided to kick it in the city for the 4th afterall, 9. Sarah and Scott invited us to there place, 11. Kavitha's friend had a timing change and joined us, 12. Then Kavitha's friend had a friend come 13.
Luckily there was enough sezuan cucumbers, sesame noodles, tropical fruit kugel, chana masala, cantaloupe, strawberries and wine to go comfortable around. I'm so glad we live in such a spontaneous community. It's great, you make two phone calls and end up with 13 people. Oh, and the shabbat significant-other makes a metaphysical 14.

When we heard that more than 10 people were coming we needed to think about where would fit them all. We had a table that a friend of Rob's gave us. We checked and it had all 4 legs but they were not attached. Two of the 4 legs had the necessary ikea hardware to screw them in. sadly the table was unsurprisingly unstable with only two good legs. While i was finishing up with the some food prep, jon lept into creative engineering genius mode. He had about 8 minutes before people showed up and the missing parts were ikea specific, a mere run to the hardware store would not fix the problem. he devised a characteristically, highly effective, frankly unorthodox solution that involved sticky tack, another table, several books, and a lot of love. it is still standing and in no immediate danger of falling down. go jon! good thing you didn't go hiking.

The sesame noodles were a hit. So i posted them over at two heads of lettuce. this is the recipe.