How to Be a Good Dinner Party Guest

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I just watched Ina Garten on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It was a nice segment, mostly about her upcoming cookbook, Simply Ina (it's not coming out until October, but I know how important pre-sales are for all kinds of books, so I pre-ordered it here).

You can watch the whole segment on YouTube. At least, you can right now. I have no idea what will happen to the show's YouTube archive when it goes off the air in May.

I've always loved her ethos that store bought is often just fine, there's no need to make everything from scratch. As much as I love to cook and bake, I use a lot of shortcuts myself. For example, I've never found a brownie recipe quite as good as the one I (probably) got from the back of a Duncan Hines box decades ago, which starts with a boxed brownie mix but adds extra things to it. I also make a fantastic tomato sauce, but when I'm too busy or in the mood for something different from mine, Rao's marinara is my go-to.

According to Ina, her upcoming book is supposed to be filled with shortcuts, like making a homemade sauce for a store-bought cheesecake, or using a boxed stuffing mix as the base for a savory bread pudding.

But it was the last few minutes of the segment that I found the most useful, where she talked about how to be a good guest at a dinner party. I have to admit, I'm kind of clueless about that kind of thing. In fact, I would feel weird referring to something as a "dinner party." We invite friends over for dinner. We go to friends houses for dinner. (And because I have issues with time management and organization, sometimes it doesn't even occur to me until I'm walking out the door that I should bring something, which usually necessitates a frantic trip to a bakery to pick up cookies.)

But whatever you call it, she has some great advice for going to someone else's house for dinner, plus a couple of things you should do as the host.

• Guests should show up 15 minutes after the appointed time. So if the invitation is for 7, show up at 7:15 so that the host isn't in the shower. (Yes, that has happened to me - as the host! Like I said, I have issues with time management.)
• Never bring flowers unless they're in a vase and ready to be put out. The host has enough to do without having to deal with your flowers.
• Never bring anything that the host should serve that night. You don't know what else they're serving, or if the other guests have any dietary restrictions or allergies. Plus, it's just rude. They might have taken great care with designing their menu, and they don't want you to throw a food grenade into the middle of it.
• Do bring something they can have the next morning, like coffee and granola, or croissants. I love this because if they're like me, their kitchen might be a disaster the next morning, and they won't have to worry about making breakfast. (Time management again...I swear I'm working on it!)
• Do offer to help clean up.
• However, as the host, you should NEVER accept that help!!

That last one is a big one for me. I don't like it when people offer to help clean up at my house. Or rather, I should say I hate it when they insist. Go ahead and offer, but believe me when I say no thank you. That's something I would rather do alone, watching some good TV, after everyone is gone (often the next morning, because I've been cleaning and cooking and I'm tired!!).

Ina also says that the perfect size for a dinner party is six people around a small round table. That sounds exactly right to me.

I've been a member of a cookbook club for many years. We have seven members. Any bigger than that and it wouldn't seem like a cohesive group. As it is, there are sometimes two different conversations happening at those dinners, with just seven of us. More people than that would be chaos!

So go forth and dinner party, with Ina's blessing.