Reply to I want to start hosting more, but I’m not a great cook

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just do a wine and cheese party instead! When I was in my 20s in NYC and people didn’t really use their kitchens, the standard was to have a party with a great cheese and crackers spread from Fairway (RIP) or Zabars.  If you advertise it to your friends as a “wine and cheese party” they’ll know what to expect. [/quote]

I live in NYC and Fairway is still around! I popped into the UES one a few days ago.

OP, you don’t have to be a good cook to host! I do a lot of “semi-homemade” cooking that involves mostly assembly or basic prep using a lot of assistance from store-bought ingredients. I love to cook, but I make meals like these on weekdays all the time and would feel zero guilt serving them to friends.

Like:

- Spaghetti and meatballs: Boil spaghetti or linguine. In a separate pot, reheat decent-quality meatballs (you could do frozen or premade from a nicer supermarket) in a decent-quality store bought sauce (Carbone and Rao’s have good ones). If you want to make an easy homemade sauce, Marcella Hazan’s tomato and butter sauce is amazing with extremely minimal effort. Then get a couple of Caesar salad kits and maybe make some garlic bread on the side (which is mostly assembly too - you can use jarred minced garlic if you have it). Serve really good Parmesan that you grated yourself alongside the spaghetti.

- One-pot rice: Prepare a boxed jambalaya or red beans and rice mix. Add any combination of sliced smoked sausage (precooked, I get mine from Whole Foods), chicken, or shrimp. Roasted veggies on the side.

- Fajitas: Slice sirloin/flank/skirt/ribeye steak, green peppers, and white/yellow onions into roughly equal sized slices. Drizzle in some oil and a packet or two of taco seasoning (Trader Joe’s has a good one) and let marinate for an hour. Throw it all onto a hot cast iron pan to cook. Serve with tortillas, salsa, and shredded cheese on the side.

- Stir-fry: Buy stir-fry sauce. Whole Foods has some nice high-end ones in the Asian aisle. Buy and cut up veggies of your choice, or buy a bagged stir-fry veggie mix if you prefer. Slice steak or chicken thighs, season and velvet the meat if you can. Heat up a cast iron if you don’t have a wok, add oil, then the veggies and meat, then some garlic and ginger (you can mince it yourself or buy frozen pre-minced cubes at Whole Foods), then the sauce. I like to pair this with noodles. The Momofuku brand, available at Whole Foods, is good. I cook them without the included sauce and mix them in at the end.

With any of these, you can serve box mix brownies (Ghirardelli), fruit, and/or ice cream for dessert. Or pick something up. Or ask a guest to. None of these are the fanciest meal, but IMO they’re plenty respectable.
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