{"id":363534,"date":"2026-08-02T12:17:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T12:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/how-to-be-a-good-dinner-party-guest\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T12:17:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T12:17:20","slug":"how-to-be-a-good-dinner-party-guest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=363534","title":{"rendered":"How to Be a Good Dinner Party Guest"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n
\"A<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\"A<\/figure>\n

This post may contain affiliate links and\/or codes.<\/em>
You won’t pay anything extra, but I might make a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n

I just watched Ina Garten on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It was a nice segment, mostly about her upcoming cookbook, Simply Ina<\/em> (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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

You can watch the whole segment <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. I also make a fantastic tomato sauce<\/a>, but when I’m too busy or in the mood for something different from mine, Rao’s marinara is my go-to<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n