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For dinner, anything from Alison Roman. For dessert, anything from Claire Saffitz. It’s a pretty basic take but their recipes are simple and incredibly tasty.

Lamb. Its not rare but its unusual around here (and cheaper than beef) so it feels posh and fancy to most people.
Serve it with some roasted diced potatoes and some sort of sauteed greens and it looks like you’re spending big bucks and big effort on a meal.

Also having drink varieties is a huge plus.

it’s not the what, it’s the how. It’s some kind of complex sauce or stew, served over some kind of rustic carb that will soak up the sauce. I adjust the spices in the sauce/stew as I go along and get inspired, but I do stick to some basics/fundamentals, like garlic, oregano, olive oil, tomatoes, cumin and sometimes, cinnamon.

Spanikopita

i buy milk, flour and vitamins and boil them down to little energy balls

Elk Osso Buco - Beyond The Chicken Coop https://www.beyondthechickencoop.com/elk-osso-buco/

Usually something super complicated that has caught my fancy but I have never tried before. Lol.

Still more hits than misses. Most people can’t cook these days and I’m pretty comfortable in the kitchen. I can pump out delicious food with basically whatever. But for an occasion I’ll put in the couple days to really do something up.

It depends on if I like the guest or secretly wish they were dead. if it’s the former I order takeout. if it’s the latter… I cook.

now baking on the other hand… I always bake from scratch. and never give my cookies to people I hate.

It’s not the dish that impresses, but the preparation.

One year, my family and I were at my middle brother’s house for a summer time visit. He had a party and grilled chicken. My brother never really learned how to cook and it showed. People barely touched it and there was a ton of it left over.

Fast forward another year and he wants to do the same thing. I offer to cook so he can attend to other more important party affairs. The only thing I did differently was I started with fresh good quality chicken and not mass frozen bagged stuff from Tyson. I also brought my instant read thermometer. Otherwise it was just salt and pepper on the chicken, although I used a ton more than he did.

Same number of people, same amount of chicken… There were NO left overs. I also made my cubed potatoes, those were gone too.

It was all technique. I used virtually the same ingredients he had the year prior.

That primarily depends on the guest. There is no one size fits all dish.

What i can do to impress is that I ask the guest to name three ingredients, and I cook something using those.

As a one size fits all kinda thing: sourdough bread, that takes me like 24 hours from start to finish, with incubating over night in the fridge.

Other than that, it depends. We already cook good for ourselves regularly, no need to wait for there to be guests. So we cook just regular food, whatever we think our guests might enjoy.

Spaghetti. Boiling water is the most advanced cooking thing I care to learn.

Either steak or salmon but depends on the guest like others have mentioned. I usually also enjoy putting my own spin on the recipe, like adding a spice or making it more citrusy etc

I have no one visiting me