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Foolproof dinner party

Do dinner parties send you into a flat spin? Here's a menu from Julia Watson that even Bridget Jones could manage

Does the blue soup episode in Bridget Jones's Diary strike a familiar chord? Have you found yourself sliding over a cluttered and greasy kitchen floor, tripping over bowls of mashed potato and using up every pan you possess in an effort to replicate some fanciful creation in a glossy cookbook? Having a few people for dinner can turn the most reasonable individual into a dithering wreck.

It doesn't have to be so hard. If you can read, you can cook, surely. Just follow the instructions. Pastry, for instance. What could be so hard about a recipe with only two ingredients and water?

Ideally, what one wants is a menu which gives the impression that armies of sous-chefs have been labouring behind the scenes to produce each culinary triumph, when in fact you knocked the whole thing off yourself between munching your Shreddies and leaving for work. Which detail you modestly reveal in the course of fielding the praise.

Organisation is the key. Pre-plan, pre-cook. Polish off as much of the meal in advance as possible, then you can mingle gaily with your guests instead of emerging in a sweaty heap from the kitchen with something dire on a plate, hours after they've knocked back all the booze. After all, along with creating a gratifying opportunity to impress the socks off them with your skill and efficiency, the reason you invited them was because you quite like their company.

Any halfwit can come up with shepherd's pie. A dinner party is a means of demonstrating more finely-honed food tastes and aspirations, an opportunity to reveal that behind the façade that is Ms or Mr Anticipating-a-Stock-Option during the day, is a heart that beats, at night, to Escoffier's drum.

Consider the following natty little menu of profoundly of-the-moment dishes:

• Parma ham, mozzarella and leaf salad
• Fish fillets steamed in their own scented juices
• Petits pots de chocolat

The fish, which could, more accurately, be called 'Fish in a Paper Bag' - though not one with 'Prada' stamped on it, please - can be 'packaged' hours ahead. So can the pud, and, if you like an admiring audience while you plate the salad, Baba Ghanoush, a smokey aubergine dip made the previous night, will keep them from expiring with excitement.

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