LET’S COOK: THE MID-COITAL SNACK TRAY

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There are many kinds of coitus. From grabbing your partner for a stress fuck to lazy slow mys-fucking, ranging from a sprint to a leisurely stroll. But sometimes it’s a marathon. 

Sometimes you lay around in between, checking your phone, playing music, joking and having a good snog. And sometimes when you’re sitting up, checking Tumblr while rubbing a fine ass with the other hand, you realize you’re a tad peckish. 

You can certainly get up and head down to the kitchen and indeed you should get up periodically. (PSA: Stay hydrated and pee. Bacteria + urethra = bad.) But if you stay in the kitchen too long you lose the flow, so you want that mid-coital snack to be ready fast. 

The best way to do that is to make it in advance. Plus, if you’re trying to impress the person you’re with, you want something with a bit of style. Enter the charcuterie board. Technically speaking, it should only have meats on it, but we’ve disregarded that for some time now. And it’s not just for micro pubs and dinner parties – a charcuterie board is the perfect mid-coital snack you can prep and leave under a cloth in the kitchen.

Let’s look at the board I made out of stuff sitting in my kitchen. I like to have a few sauces, though only do so if you have sauce cups. I know some places like to make smears, but we’re going to be in bed. A sauce may be sexy when you can smear it with your fingers on your partner – not so much when it’s on your bed sheets and you’ve laid on it sweating. 

For this board, I chose a nice, robust mango chutney and a sweet and peppery bacon sauce. For the meats, I went with boar’s head salami and pepperoni. You can buy them precut to your taste, and while they are far from the most expensive cured meats out there, they are much better than the stuff you find in the refrigerated sections of a grocery store.

You must add some kind of bread and cheese. I like to use neutral crackers. There’s a vast variety, but I prefer plain to let the other flavors dominate. For cheese, use at least two. I threw four cheeses on out of my fridge: two fruity goats’ cheeses – a blueberry vanilla and a cranberry cinnamon. Both are super creamy, but then I threw two non-sweet options on as well, a Havarti and a smoked Gouda. Don’t worry about these being too neat, especially with the super creamy cheeses, but you do need to include a cheese knife on the tray if they are that soft.

I wanted some more umami flavors, so I took a teacup and butter fried some mushrooms that can make you weak in the knees. These are best warm, so feel free to toss them in the microwave for about 10-20 seconds before you bring the tray to bed. Grapes go into another cup. 

Finally, I didn’t care about this looking too professional, so I tossed some hard-boiled teriyaki eggs (recipe here) on top and cut up some fresh figs since they were in season. If you’re preparing your tray in advance, leave the figs whole and cut them up just before serving, and the same goes for the eggs which should be in the fridge until it’s time.

There you go, a robust sideboard to sustain one appetite while you’re fueling another.

Enjoy.

Leto Armitage was born in America under a set of circumstances that prophesied that he would one day unite the lost tribes and return the Ever Summer. Somewhere around twelve, he realized he had been left unsupervised and binged too many Arthurian movies in his formative years and that he was just another kid who accidentally got an education while reading above his age level.

By the time he turned old enough to get a passport, he started finding excuses to travel determined to find out what culture, food and women there were to experience. After learning to grill in Oaxaca, do kinbaku in Japan, and being banned from several former Soviet block countries, he returned home to settle down and see what damage he could do locally.

After working jobs including being a short order cook, bodyguarding strippers and professionally doing reader’s advisory for erotica he realized the most reasonable path forward was to become a writer. Today he lives with cats, dogs, and humans who seem to like him despite actually knowing him. He prefers to sit on his back deck, listening to the birds and Barry the Bumblebear bee, while he writes cozy, uplit romance and raunchy erotica.