how to host when you can't cook

no "salt to taste" required

Jul 13, 2024

“Now’s a great time for bad cooks to be good dinner party hosts.”

In an FT Weekend podcast episode about how to host a great dinner party, hidden amongst talk of roasting whole fishes, taking the previous day off work for prep and making signature drinks, is a brilliant hot take from the Financial Times food and drink editor, Harriet Fitch Little.

She takes the example of Brutto’s anchovies and butter on toast – the £9.20 starter getting instagrammed left and right, a flagship of the restaurant that specialises in simple, produce-forward Florentine cuisine. While it might be easy to slam the price tag and chalk it up to social media hype, London-flation and aspirational dining, sometimes good ingredients (and the labour of the people who cook them) just cost that much. “One of them comes in a tin and one of them comes from a bakery” does not mean “you’re getting ripped off” – it means you can make a show stopping dish for your friends and yourself with a plate, a bread knife and some ingredient sourcing.

Lilah Raptopoulos, the podcast’s host, mentions radishes and butter with a chuckle. The Americans may have found out about this combination only recently, but I vividly remember getting these at the school canteen regularly; a single serving of butter individually wrapped in a small, golden envelope. All you need to live your dream French picnic summer is to get some crunchy, spicy radishes, and a slab of the good butter to mellow them out. That’s it. Not even a utensil.

Read the full transcript of the episode here.

Her last bit of wisdom (well, her husband’s): “You don’t need to make the bread.” Just like your friends aren’t going to sever ties with you because they noticed that you didn’t dust that one baseboard before hosting them for brunch, they also won’t leave immediately and slam the door on their way out because you didn’t spend the last 48 hours sweating over the stove making every dish you were planning on serving them from scratch.

Dinner parties are about sharing – food, but also quality time. The dishes facilitate that, sure, but do you need a Cordon Bleu education to host friends without shame? Ew, no.

So, anchovies on toast, radishes and butter, sliced tomatoes and hand-torn basil… and what? You’ll get cabin fever just rotating between the three. In fact, I don’t even think the tomatoes should be on that list; that does require some level of comfort with seasoning. If bad cooks are to become good dinner party hosts, they need a sweet spot between slapping a ready meal in the oven and cooking a seven-course omakase from scratch: something that shows they’ve put the effort in, with a margin of error so wide you can’t see the other side of it.

So, here are a few more loose, dead-easy “recipes” for hosting, that only require you to get the nice stuff – you don’t even need salt. You can serve them tapas style, or if you do want to put some effort into one special dish, as sides.

Smashed cucumber salad

Get a cucumber. Using any heavy blunt object in your kitchen (a cutting board, a pint glass, the bottom of a pan, a vengeful fist), make it pay for what it did. Put the shards in a bowl, and drizzle a spoonful each of soy sauce and sesame oil over them.

Melon and Parma ham

Cut a melon (carefully!) into segments, like the inside of an orange. Spoon out and discard the stringy insides. Serve on a platter alongside a pack of Parma ham you got from Tesco Express on your way home from work.

Pesto twists

Spread store bought pesto (green or red) in a thin, even layer on one side of a store bought roll of puff pastry, store boughtingly. Cut long strips with a knife and twist them gently to make them look like a curl. Bake on a sheet at, like, 180ºC for, like, half an hour. They will look golden and feel crispy to the touch when they’re ready.

Baked camembert

Take a camembert out of its box; line it with a square of parchment paper; put the camembert back in. Score the top “skin” with a knife in a couple of places, and bake in a 180ºC oven for about 15-20 minutes, until it’s basically liquid inside and jiggles when moved.

You can add toppings to it (for example: honey, jam, chutney, dried herbs, pre-minced garlic, chilli crisp…), but at the end of the day, very few people will be disappointed by baked camembert. Serve with toasted bread.

Straight up tapas

Not all tapas are easy to make – in fact, very few are. But you can probably slice an octopus tentacle you got pre-cooked from the fishmonger into 1-inch segments, and serve them with a small dish of mayonnaise that you’ve mixed with a few drops of hot sauce.

You can adorn a slice of manchego with an anchovy fillet, or wrap it in a blanket of Serrano ham. If you’re feeling brave, you can char some padrón peppers in a hot, oiled non-stick pan until just blackening on each side.

Hell, if you’re really desperate, you can even (god forbid) serve some fancy olives. Just not to me, please.

Beef Wellington

Just kidding. Can you imagine?

Chai mocktail

The night before, slap a couple of chai tea bags into a jug of cold water. Store in the fridge. When your guests get there, fill glasses with ice and equal parts cold-brewed chai and lemonade.

I say “mocktail”, but you can definitely add some gin or rum to this. I’m not a cop.

Strawberry salad

Quarter strawberries directly over your serving bowl. Gently mix them with a spoonful or two of sugar and the juice of half a lemon. If you’re feeling fancy, throw some hand-torn basil or mint and a crack of black pepper in. Let it sit in the fridge until it’s ready to serve (this will give the sugar the time to draw a sweet, bright red syrup from the strawberries), on its own or with store bought ice cream.

Bread and _______

And so we end where we started. Look, nothing beats a good loaf of sourdough and stuff to dip it in/stack on it/spread on it.

Store bought dips, a tin of sardines as is or rollmops from the jar, really good butter, a nice pâté, a selection of cheeses, olive oil and balsamic vinegar mixed in a shallow plate, smoked salmon and crème fraîche, ricotta and honey… The world is your oyster. Have a bread party or something.

If you have more ideas for these types of dishes, I’d love to hear them!