When I first started to believe that being a grown up meant having people for meals, dinner always seemed the most stressful. Just the word itself seemed to conjure images with a certain elegance. Dinner is your opportunity for maximum wow factor, however for many people it also brings with it the maximum opportunity for the "it's 3 pm and the guest arrive at 7" meltdown. In order to avoid the ugly event of world war three with spouse/partner there are a few essential things to keep in mind when hosting a dinner party.
The secret is, and this took me a while to get, when people are invited to your home for dinner, they are not expecting the food of a papered chef. If that were the case, lets face it we, would just all go out and save the washing up. When people come to your home for dinner, they come for a more relaxed experience, and nothing destroys a relaxed dinner more than a frazzled host on the verge of tears. People come for good company, good conversation, to laugh too loud and to ask for seconds. Dinner is the time to really pull out all the stops and serve really wonderful food and we are lucky now to have such a huge variety of ingredient available to us that we do not need to resort to heavy butter and cream laden sauces to make things taste wonderful. Don't get me wrong these all still have a place in my heart, but if I want it to keep beating they must be consumed sparingly.
