How to Keep Your Cool While Playing Host (It's Possible)

Should you ask your guests to bring something? How do you keep people out of the kitchen? How do you serve everything at the right temp? Feel like you've forgotten how to be a good host? (Same.) In our latest series, Be My Guest, a friendly expert takes on questions from our community and deftly puts fears to rest, suggesting all the ways in which we can all get back to hosting safely—and confidently. It is (almost) the holidays after all!

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A few years back, I invited a handful of friends over for polenta and short ribs, the coziest meal I could think of on that chilly late-fall night. One of them asked if their then-girlfriend could come, and I said of course, the more the merrier, and then they told me that it was actually her birthday, and I said we’ll have a toast, and then she showed up, and let me know that actually, she was a vegetarian—so she wouldn’t be eating the main course that I’d been cooking for three hours, and I didn’t have an alternative planned. I was embarrassed and flustered—I should have asked! I’m a horrible host! And why didn’t she tell me! But her eyes got wide at the pot of bubbling, cheesy polenta on my stove, which she indicated would be her birthday present. We all ate well; the vegetarian and my friend are now happily married.

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* This article was originally published here