The first time I threw a dinner party, I did pretty much everything wrong. In my eagerness to impress, I’d chosen a fussy, complicated dish I’d never made before. The day of, I ran to multiple grocery stores to track down everything the meal required, then spent several hours sweating in the kitchen as I struggled to make the mess of ingredients on my counter look like the picture in the recipe. By the time I finished cooking, straightened up and changed, I was exhausted, and the first guest hadn’t even set foot in my house.