We’ve had a few big months at SWIISH HQ so we thought there was no better way to celebrate than with a big team dinner. We love to entertain and we love to eat (way too much sometimes haha) so having a dinner party seemed like the one and only choice!
Entertaining guests can be stressful so consider us your fairy godmothers that are here to share all of our tricks of the trade with you, to guarantee a stress-free night of food, fun and more food (can you tell we like our food?).
Set the table the day before. This saves so much time on the day of entertaining and is something that can be done fairly quickly. To set the table, we keep it pretty simple but we always make sure to have assorted candles and fresh flowers as our centrepiece. Make sure the flowers are small enough though so you can see the person opposite you because you don’t want to be seeing a sunflower instead of someone’s face hahaha. Any flowers will work, our favourites are tulips, peonies, hydrangeas, short-stemmed roses or even a mix of natives.
As many SWIISH readers will know, our food philosophy is almost the same as our flower philosophy in that we like to keep things very simple. Simple enough that we don’t have to be slaving away in the kitchen all night but tasty enough that our guests want to finish their meals ha! The dinners we keep coming back to when entertaining are our one-pot pasta, or a roast. We always serve our one pot pasta with a fresh loaf of sourdough with lashings of butter and olive oil and a salad to you know, balance all those carbs out. You can tell that our Italian heritage* really shines through when we entertain (*we aren’t actually Italian, we just wish we were hahaha).
Sometimes the time it takes to clean our home can take as long as the actual dinner itself, so to make it a quick and easy job, we always have our Dyson V8 Absolute Cord-Free Vacuum on hand. The hassle-free and superlight handheld vacuum is perfect for days and nights when we’re entertaining.
Even if the house is a mess, we always find that by just giving it a quick once over with the Dyson, it’s clean in next to no time. The trick, though, is just to leave the Dyson out, and do quick cleans as you need to throughout the week, so that you aren’t saving it all up for one huge vacuum that takes ages on the weekend.
Although we have a slight obsession with cleaning gadgets and things being tidy, we are also busy women who don’t have a lot of time to be lugging a vacuum cleaner from room to room so when we heard the new Dyson V8 Absolute cord-free vacuum cleaner had 40 minutes of battery life (compared to 20 minutes in previous models) and is only 2.6kg, we were over the moon!
And it’s not just before the dinner party where it comes in handy. Cleaning up a mess under the table is a breeze! You know those guests who literally miss their mouth every time they eat and half of the food ends up on the floor? Us too! So a quick clean under the table after everyone heads home means a sleep in the next day instead! Yippee!
Check out our video for the full scoop and even more tips and tricks:
We consider ourselves to be quite the singing and dancing queens (other people would happily disagree haha) so it’s no surprise that a dinner party is not complete without some good tunes. And if that consists entirely of Adele, then that’s okay with us! But if our guests like more variety than Adele’s three albums (highly likely), we just jump onto Spotify and choose one of their playlists.
There you have it – our top tips for entertaining! If you have an obsession with vacuuming like we do or want to try the Dyson V8 Absolute cord-free vacuum cleaner because you’re constantly spilling things on the floor, you can shop online or head in to any major electrical retailer.
This post is sponsored by Dyson but all opinions, thoughts and comments are our own.
