Receta Easy Entertaining: How to Prepare for Last Minute Guests
by Chelsea Day • Nov 12, 2012 Our posts feature partner companies.
Easy Entertaining: How to Prepare for Last Minute Guests
With our move into the new house officially complete, we’ve been having a ton of last minute guests dropping by to check out our upgraded stomping grounds and bring over housewarming gifts. Fortunately, I’ve become kind of a wiz at easy entertaining over the years. I love playing host, even without advance notice, especially now that I’ve picked up a few key tips that make it easy and fun to welcome our friends and family anytime.
Easy Entertaining: How to Always be Prepared for Last Minute Guests
Keep high-quality ingredients on hand
The key to an easy meal in a hurry – and thus one of the main keys to easy entertaining – is to have high-quality ingredients on hand. Creative mixing of bold flavors makes for simple, crowd-pleasing meals. Once you learn to let good food stand for itself, you’ll spend a lot less time stressing over meal preparation. Shake things up with creative mixtures like spinach and blackberries, goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, for easy meals that will impress even the most discerning guest.
The freezer is your friend
I always store some basic meal essentials in the freezer in case I need to whip up a last-minute dish and don’t have time to run to the store. Some of my favorite things to keep on hand are frozen meatballs (pasta is perfect for easy entertaining), pizza, casserole and enchiladas.
Snack components
Keep snack items around for when guests drop by at not-quite-mealtime. Crackers and cheese are awesome, or you can add in some deli meats for slightly heavier fare. A favorite snack of mine is the meat-cheese-vegetable combo, like bacon-wrapped cream cheese jalapeños, ham and mozzarella-wrapped asparagus or the prosciutto-wrapped dates above.
Good wine
Alcohol just makes everything taste better, doesn’t it? Keeping good wine around will help round out your last minute food and make easy entertaining a breeze.
Visit the LG USA Facebook page or website for more easy entertaining tips! The LG Blast Chiller, available in the 3-Door Super Capacity French-Door refrigerator (LFX31935), can chill a room temperature, 12oz beverage in five minutes or a bottle of wine in just eight minutes. By comparison, a typical refrigerator takes about 40 minutes to accomplish this task – even in the freezer. This refrigerator is also among the largest capacity 36-inch refrigerators currently on the market, offering almost 20 percent more space and the ability to store over 50 gallons of milk.
Disclosure: Compensation was provided by LG via Glam Media. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of LG.