Excellent Party Hosting Tips

I’ve written before about the perfect list of party booze. Now I want to share some quick tips about hosting your lil’ party. These are all lessons I’ve learned — hope they give you some ideas about how to make your next party a little easier to host.

NB: I’m not talking about your college house party — I’m talking about your “i’m a little older now but I still want to have fun and a I don’t want to be all crazy hungover in the morning but I do want to feel like my life is not boring — i’m not boring, right?” party.

Sausage

I think the best foods you can have at a party are finger foods. None of this making your own sandwich or everybody going through some buffet line and sitting down together. What you want are little plates and lots of toothpicks.

My favorite party food (when I’m hosting) is definitely sausages — bockwursts, bratwursts, italian sausage, german sausage, sausage sausage, and other slender meat-bits that you can easily cook, cut, spear and dip into lots and lots of French’s mustard. Get a handful of different kinds of meat packaged into man-pecker shapes and you’ll be good to go. Always a hit.

Again, sausage is just my preference for my parties — you might choose something else — but I love how easy and quick they are to cook, as well as how satisfying it is to get lots and lots of mustard in your mouth on little meat spoons… of course it’s also a rush to enjoy a food with culture-wide cliché anecdotes about how you really really don’t want to see how this stuff is made.

Tequila at 9:35pm

I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Here’s a little tip from an experienced party-thrower from outside my family:

At 9:35pm have a serving platter or waiter tray of shots of tequila ready, then walk around to different groups and say “I’ll do one if you do one!” Taking a shot at this point is the perfect little kick-start for your guests. To show up with a gift like this at a very vulnerable time in your party-goers’ night can turn your little soirée into a life-altering sleep-over! (if that’s your thing).

Paper Plates

Use paper plates.

Ice to the Brim

This one’s a two-parter: 1: Make sure you have loads and loads of ice. Ice is cheap, and the amount of ice you have is directly related to the amount of party you have. So make sure you have lots and lots of ice because nobody, nobody likes luke warm vodka tonics — that’s gross.

2: Fill every cocktail glass with ice to the brim… it goes all the way to the top. Go ahead, spill a couple cubes, experience a life of abundant essentials. Ice plays such a crucial role in a good cocktail. Ice is the heart of the cocktail, it’s the lifespan of the drink. Buy lots of it and keep the glasses full.

Run The Dishwasher Before Bed

You’re not going to feel like it, but if you get a friend to help you collect glasses and dishes and run the dishwasher before you go to sleep you’ll be setup for success the next day.

I mean it, this is a big time investment in the next day and a simple trick that makes throwing parties in the future all the more realistic. Because when you’re all by yourself and it takes you 3 hours to clean up last nights debris, you’re going to think twice about having another party. On the other hand, if you and a friend or two get a bunch of offal thrown into the dishwasher in 20 min before you go to sleep, the next day’s cleanup is that therapeutic type of cleaning, the type where you’re, like, “ok me, I forgive you.” And that’s an important part of any good party.

Enjoy Abundant Simple Things Responsibly™