Grilling, Sophisticated and Easy
As a general rule, I'm a terrible cook. Unlike Charity, it's not one of my talents. Although I'm capable of making decent-tasting food, usually I'm too bloody lazy to bother. Most times, if my food tastes good, I'm content. I don't insist on a lot of variety, either; 3lbs. of spaghetti or taco meat or catchatori will last me for a week and I'm content to eat it for three meals a day. I can't eat TV dinners, but I'm totally fine with pot pies, pre-made bbq ribs (they only take 10 minutes in the oven!), and other frozen foods that go into the oven.
Despite this, I love to grill. Most of my parties are outside, where my family has a big, elevated fireplace that we made out of cinderblocks and firebrick, a brick oven (made by us of the same material), a nice big cinderblock grill with two heights for the coal, and a smoker (which we didn't make, but it's still awesome). In my family, we take grilling seriously. Hotdogs and hamburgers are not allowed at my parties; I grew up on venison bites, made from deer shot by the next-door-neighbors who came to the pitfires my dad hosted (which were the center of the neighborhood). Nothing compares to the baked beans my mother makes on the grill, and the best apple pie I've ever had was made in the brick oven right beside it.
Now that I'm older, I host my own parties out on that patio. It's not the neighbors who come, but friends of mine (though neighbors are always welcome, we tend to stay out later than the retired folks who live where I grew up), and we don't cook my parents' food. We cook mine. There still aren't hotdogs, though, and I'm not the kind of person who cooks with a recipe; I cook by eye. On the grill, it's the only way to be sure.
I had never really cooked before I hosted my first party, but I had a friend who was vegetarian and I love(d) chicken, so we started from there and raided the garage cabinets for stuff to season with. Here's what we use: