Keys to easy fun dinner party

1) Invite fun people. (duh)
2) Easy-ish food items that cook for an hour in the oven. This way you can hang out with guests while things finish up or 'rest' or cool a bit instead of frantically sauteing things at the last minute (that's the 'tricky fun dinner party').
3) Get Anna to make freakin-good pomegranate fruit salad!
4) dishwasher.

I had a hankering to roast a chicken on Saturday night so I invited Rupes and C.N. and Anna and Katie over. The roast chicken you stuff with garlic and ginger and lemon slices and oil it all over with salt and pepper, and of course one must have potatoes, so to use up the rest of our local cream I made potato gratin, just layers of sliced potatoes with salt/pepper/gruyere in between, filled up with cream and baked for an hour. Josh made delicious roasted red and yellow beets and their beet greens that we picked up at the Mill Valley Center in the morning. Super duper yum. And Anna brought the fruit salad and wine was brought by guests and it was like, a super fun evening!

Of course now I have another dinner party coming up and can't just be a one trick pony so roast chicken and potatoes are out out out. I have been recently starring fun recipes in the food blogs I read so perhaps I will turn to them for inspiration...