when I was twelve years old I hosted my first party. It was a luau in my friend Ashley’s backyard and it was basically one big elaborate ruse to wear a grass skirt in front of a boy named Brian. I had been in love with Brian for years—or at least as deeply in love as you can be in sixth grade—and the party seemed like the perfect way to establish a deeper connection. Sadly for me, and my grass skirt, Brian spent most of that summer evening doing cannonballs instead of paying attention to me. Can you imagine my chagrin? There I was in my best Kmart two-piece, rocking my vanilla-flavored Lip Smackers; my side pony was totally on point, and he didn’t look at me even once! I’ll be honest, it was the first time I failed to lock in a new boyfriend over processed snack food, but sadly, not the last.

Bright side? I did discover a lifelong love for hosting parties. Oh sure, I was familiar with parties. I had grown up with parents who loved to entertain, but that luau was the first time I’d tried it on my own. It gave me a hint of what it was like to pick out invitations and design a theme. I chose Hawaiian Punch as our beverage (something my twelve-year-old brain thought was terribly witty), and kebabs as our appetizer. In the days before Pinterest, or, gosh, even the Internet (man, that makes me feel old!), it was a highly thematic party and I was utterly proud of myself. So what started as a ploy toward preteen romance became a lifelong passion.

That passion is why I still love to entertain at home. I love parties and potlucks. I love family dinners and cocktails with my friends on the back patio. I love Sunday suppers and Taco Tuesdays and celebrating on any day that ends in Y. I love the food, the wine, and having friends and family and people from all walks of life come together in one well-decorated space. I love giving people something to look forward to. I love sharing recipes. I love oohing and aahing over Mema’s carrot cake or discussing how adding the sweet basil really set off the flavors in Daddy’s spaghetti sauce. I love themes, and cocktail napkins, and finding the perfect platter to display the turkey. I love all of these things, because everyone I know loves them, too. If there are people out there who don’t enjoy a great meal with their loved ones—I’ve never met them!—maybe that’s just because they haven’t been to my house.

i grew up in a family full of loud Okie expats who migrated to Southern California during the dust bowl. It was by way of these characters—my grandpa Bill, my grandma Opal, Mema, and Papa and a menagerie of aunts, uncles, and cousins—that I learned to cook (and eat) at an early age. In our southern culture, everything revolved around food: What were we cooking? Who was bringing what to the potluck? Where would we celebrate Christmas dinner this year? Sharing a meal with the people I love has always been an integral part of my life. And because of this, food and I go together like peanut butter and jelly, like cheese and crackers, like a chocolate sundae with a side of fries … it just makes sense.

My family and I lived in a tiny pink parsonage on the outskirts of a small town on a street called Weedpatch Highway (yep, you read that right). As the baby of four, I had an unlimited supply of hand-me-down clothes, and even though my small hometown is in California, I spoke with the same thick twang as all of my southern relatives. So, as you might guess, the phrase “formal entertaining” wasn’t part of our vernacular. Honestly, we didn’t even have a word for it. My family just always had people over, always threw parties, and always made the biggest, fattest deal out of every holiday and birthday. And regardless of how much (or frankly, little) money we had, everyone was welcome. We weren’t the Brady Bunch—far from it in fact. But those Christmases, those barbecues, those Sunday suppers are some of the most precious memories I have of my childhood. It was how I learned to show love: by cooking, by baking, by welcoming guests into our home, by setting the table with our mismatched china. Even on a random weeknight, there was always room for celebration.

at the ripe old age of seventeen, I moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and marry Matt Damon (in that order). I quickly lost interest in acting when I realized it required the complete expulsion of carbohydrates from my diet, and as for Matt … well, my real-life Prince Charming turned out to be much cuter. I met Dave Hollis when I was nineteen years old and he was twenty-seven. He was smart and funny and so, so tall, and we were very best friends from day one. When I looked at him I saw sunshine glowing around his head like magic and I could just make out the sound of a choir of baby angels singing his praises. When he looked at me he might have seen all kinds of things, but he couldn’t get past the most obvious—my age. He was absolutely too old for me, he said. He was absolutely not interested in me, he assured. It took me about a year and a half to convince him he was wrong on both counts. We’ve been happily married for twelve years.

L.A. did prove lucrative in other ways, too. I launched my company, Chic Events, there in January of 2004. My company started out small: me, myself, and the occasional rogue intern working out of the basement of my town house, using my cell phone as an office line, and taking all client meetings at the local Starbucks. I used pictures from my own wedding to build a Web site and begged my friends and family for referrals. I devoured magazines of every kind: wedding, architecture, fashion, interior design—anything that might give me ideas on planning events in a fresh, new way. I worked hard to make my work original rather than regurgitating the same candelabra over and over again.

As a result my design aesthetic, just like my big southern family, is eclectic. I love bright, bold pops of color and mixing luxury pieces with something I found in the bargain bin. I love stylish design, but I’m a busy mother of three little boys so it also has to be comfortable and practical. You can see this sense of style weave its way through my early portfolio of work all the way to the posts on my Web site, the Chic Site, today.

This mix of my downhome roots and an upscale aesthetic has become my signature, but in the beginning it wasn’t a style choice. Like all the coolest things, it was born out of necessity. When I booked those first client events years ago, I was doing parties for pennies and struggling to throw brides their dream wedding on a five-dollar budget. That meant I had to organize my spending around one or two splurge elements (like gorgeous floral or luxury linens), and then find a way to pull off the rest of the event for next to nothing. Those experiences were crucial to the creativity in designs and recipes I use today. When you don’t have much to work with, you become an expert at squeezing water from a stone. Eventually, I’d squeezed enough water that Chic Events became a high-end luxury party-planning business, even though “high-end” and “luxury” couldn’t be further from where I started out.

Let me share a story. The first time I heard the term “white trash” was when another girl called me that on the playground. I wasn’t even sure what the term meant, but I understood her tone enough to have my feelings hurt. I knew that I didn’t dress like the other girls or speak like the other girls, but for the first time I realized that this was a bad thing. It made me feel other, and somehow less than them. Isn’t it amazing how something painful in our childhood can shape so much of who we become? The shame associated with those words would follow me through adolescence and into adulthood. When I moved to Los Angeles, I decided I would make a fresh start. I did everything I could to change myself into someone different. I learned how to dress and how to speak. I distinctly remember being at a party, letting a “y’all” slip into the conversation, and being utterly mortified that it had happened. It seems so silly in retrospect, but I didn’t want to be other anymore; I wanted to fit in. I was terrified that my cool new friends in L.A. would judge me if they knew where I came from. Of course, what I’ve learned over time is that it’s nearly impossible to find true success when you’re pretending to be someone you’re not. Another life lesson? Anyone who judges you for the town you grew up in or the bend of your accent is lame. You should run far and fast in the other direction.

Also, you will never find peace unless you feel truly comfortable being exactly who you are. It doesn’t matter what clothes I wear or which mannerisms I adopt. I will always be a little girl from Weedpatch Highway. That doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else; it just makes me who I am.

Who I am is someone who loves dip recipes and cocktails served in Mason jars. It still tickles me pink that I’ve somehow managed to turn that passion for melted cheese into a career. But figuring out how to build a business around the food I love was really a happy accident. I had been running my events company for years when I decided to start a blog to market it to prospective clients. At the time, I thought it would be a great way to show off my luxury lifestyle designs because I was still trying to fit into an ideal of who I thought I should be. I had no idea what blogging was. I literally wrote about what I ate for dinner the night before. It wasn’t a surprise when I had only one reader—my mom. I would share a post about cool centerpieces from a celebrity wedding or the cocktail hour setup from a movie premiere and no matter how much I tried to be fancy, nobody cared. Then one day, without anything better to write about, I posted a dip recipe that I’d loved in childhood, and it got an incredible response. I couldn’t believe that people responded to something as simple as mayo-based dip, but they totally did. Luckily, I had a lifetime of recipes just like that one and I decided to share more.

I quickly discovered that, while the average person might enjoy lusting after million-dollar events in magazines, they certainly weren’t throwing their own. Instead, readers loved it when I posted recipes made in a slow cooker, simple casseroles, inexpensive decor, items from the dollar bin, and anything topped with sour cream. Years removed from the unconfident girl I had been, I embraced the idea. I mixed the two ideals, luxury and downhome, and set out to prove that it’s possible to do anything beautifully and with style. So, I shifted the focus of my company solely to running the Chic Site. It’s been an incredible, wild, and, to be honest, stressful journey, but it has provided me with so much joy … and unlimited access to baked goods.

I like to describe the Chic Site as my digital front porch. What I mean by that is, if we were girlfriends and we were hanging out on my front porch, these are the things we’d chat about over sweet tea: parenting our hoodlums, our marriages, everyone else’s marriages, that casserole we made for dinner last night, our favorite cocktail, our favorite book, how torturous Spanx are, how we style our hair … basically, if it’s interesting to women, that’s what I cover. I hope the content inspires our readers. I hope the content is aspirational. But, more than anything, I want what I share on the Chic Site and in this book to be achievable. I want to show the pretty things—the perfectly styled room or the gorgeous layer cake or a hand-muddled cocktail. I also want to show you the truth. The truth is that I’ve struggled with postpartum depression. The truth is that sometimes I’m so busy chasing after my boys that I don’t get a chance to shower. The truth is that I have stretch marks from three pregnancies, and while our living room is pretty, our garage looks like a bomb went off in there. The Chic Site and Upscale Downhome are not for women who live perfectly styled lives. Instead, they are for the authentic women, the honest women, the bright and joyful and messy and struggling everyday women. Because if we ever meet in real life, I hope you’d use those same words to describe me.

years ago I stumbled across the word “chic” in an old dictionary. Chic was defined as “a fashionable lifestyle, ideology, or pursuit.” I fell in love with the word and the idea that chic is the pursuit of something better, prettier, or cooler than you are today. It’s about wanting to be something greater than you are, to be more beautiful inside and out, and to live a more joyful life. Some days that might just mean something small, like putting the takeout on a real plate before you eat it. Other days that might mean something big, like agreeing to host Thanksgiving when you’ve never even seen a whole turkey, let alone cooked one. Chic isn’t a state of being or even a destination; chic is the journey you take on the way to something greater. And for a little girl who once felt so awkward and different on the playground and worked so hard to make it here, that is incredibly poignant to me.

“Here” is in Los Angeles with my husband who happens to be the cutest and most hilarious man I’ve ever met. We have three equally handsome/hilarious little boys named Jackson, Sawyer, and Ford, and we spend most of our time doing super cool/sexy things like going to soccer practice and hitting up any restaurant where kids eat free with the purchase of an adult entrée. I work full time and then I come home and run around with my hair on fire trying to take care of my boys. I am the first to tell you that there are days I can’t even remember to brush my teeth, let alone cook something special or invite people over for dinner. But I know from experience that there will also be days when you do have time. There will be moments when you have a little extra wiggle room and you can push yourself to try something new. This book is for those moments. This book is for, what should I make for dinner tonight? This book is for, how should we celebrate Mama’s birthday this year?

This book is for, maybe we should do something special. Because the truth is, this book is a gateway. The more you try out something new when you have an excuse, the more comfortable you’ll feel trying out something new for any old reason at all.

last weekend, I was chatting with one of my girlfriends and she told me she’d made dinner for her and her husband.

“Oh, what did you make?” I asked, because food is my love language.

“Oh, just a meat loaf and some mashed potatoes,” she told me.

Just a meat loaf?

Just a meat loaf?

There’s no such thing as just a meat loaf.

If you’re going to take the time to prepare a recipe at home it isn’t ever just a dish, it’s an experience. Whether it’s for twelve people or two, or just you and your cat, the fact that you put the effort into the preparation made it something special. You’re already creating something beautiful. You’re already hosting. You’re already entertaining, even if you don’t realize it. What I hope you’ll do—what I hope this book encourages you to do—is go one extra step further. Add one unexpected ingredient or take the extra minute to put your dish on a pretty tray. Trying just a little bit harder is the definition of chic, remember? So flex your hosting muscles and up your game!

So many lifestyle brands focus on what you need to do, have, or buy in order to be stylish. I believe that, just like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, you’ve always had the power. You just have to learn how to use it. Instead of hiring a florist and trying to create haute cuisine from scratch, why not embrace the recipes you grew up loving, the china you never actually use, and those roses in your backyard? I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking, I don’t know any recipes, my “china” is from the dollar store, and I have no earthly clue how to make a flower arrangement. Guess what, guys, I can help you with all of those things! I do know recipes, and how to make a flower arrangement, and I too own ninety-nine-cent dinner plates but I know how to make those suckers look good. Think of me as your favorite well-organized aunt or your really crafty cousin or your friend Kelly who bakes the best cupcakes—except, unlike your aunt, I don’t use Aqua Net or read Harlequin novels. Actually, that’s a lie, I totally read Harlequin novels. I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for any love story involving a secret baby—but that’s not the point. The point is this experience should be fun. Throw on an apron (preferably vintage), throw back a cocktail (for courage), and give it a try. No one ever complains if their party host has a snafu, and if they do, you don’t want that meanie for a friend anyway.

so you’re going to entertain, or make lasagna for you and your husband or cat or whoever, and now you’re wondering, when should I use these recipes? Maybe the better question is, when should you not use these recipes? The idea behind this cookbook is that it’s filled with real, everyday dishes, but they’re presented beautifully. So you can use them for a weeknight dinner or that bridal shower you’re hosting for your best friend. The recipe, the name, or the ingredients (and sometimes all three) for each dish is so polished you’d never know it was likely dreamed up in a trailer park. Everything you’ll find in here is beautifully presented, but every recipe is also practical. Practical is key because so many cookbooks are the food equivalent of a white sofa. Let me explain. Whenever I see a white sofa in a design magazine, I swoon. It’s so pretty, and it looks so posh in the gorgeous room it’s sitting in. But, if I ever attempted that in my own home you and I both know that my kids would get blood or chocolate or Play-Doh (or possibly all three) on that white sofa in less time than it takes to hard-boil an egg. A white sofa isn’t practical for my life, just like a lot of other cookbooks aren’t practical for my life. I think it’s magical to make your own chicken stock. It’s incredible to grow your own root vegetables and keep a starter in your fridge so you can have fresh homemade bread every day.

But, gentle reader, that’s just not my jam.

So I share recipes that are. Rather than the typical cookbook recipe sections, I’ve used categories such as “Slow Cooker,” “Potluck,” “Somethin’ Sweet,” and “Leftovers.” This is pee-my-pants food—as in, it’s so good it makes me want to pee my pants. These are the dishes I make for the people I love because I hope it makes them want to pee their pants, too. I serve the Green Chicken Enchiladas whenever new friends come for dinner, because I haven’t yet met someone who doesn’t like a fiesta. The Jalapeño Popper Dip and the Spicy Corn Dip battle for favorite snack at any Hollis family party. The Jell-O Pretzel Salad, which despite its name is actually not a salad in any way, shape, or form, is the most popular dessert I know, hands down. The Wassail has been the centerpiece of our holiday party for as long as I can remember. From beginning to end, each of these dishes makes up a special memory in my heart. I hope they’ll find their way into your heart—and your kitchen—as well.

In addition to recipes, I’ve also included a party section at the back of the book. This is a collection of my favorite ways to celebrate in my real life. I’ll show you some visual inspirations and a dream menu for each type of party using the recipes from earlier chapters. You can use it if you already have a party on the books and just need some ideas. You can use it if you’re looking for a reason to celebrate and want to come up with a theme. You can use it to re-create these parties exactly or just as a place to learn a few new tricks. But remember, there’s no such thing as just a meat loaf, and if you’re going to go to the work of creating something tasty, why not use that as a chance to celebrate life?

Because that’s what entertaining is, it’s celebrating life. You entertain because it is such an incredible way to build a sense of community for yourself and your family. You entertain because throwing a shower or a birthday party is a great way to spoil your best friend who so richly deserves it. You entertain because a Super Bowl party with all his favorite foods can mean a lot to your husband. There are so many wonderful reasons to entertain in your home, but the greatest I know is this: Life is short.

The weekend before my big brother died, we had a party. It was a Sunday in late September, and Daddy came home and announced that he’d invited everyone over, just because. It’s funny the things you remember from moments like that. I remember a big trip to the grocery store for things to cook. I remember swimming all afternoon with my cousins. I remember the menu we whipped up for our family and friends and that it was the first and only time I ever saw my aunt Linda try champagne. It was pink, and I couldn’t wait to be old enough to try some, too. We laughed and talked and people came and went all afternoon. A few days later, Ryan was gone.

I believe in my heart that someday he and I will be together again, that we’ll talk and laugh and, if heaven allows, share our own glass of pink champagne. But that doesn’t make this time without him any easier. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t devastating that he didn’t dance with me on my wedding day. It doesn’t make it less painful that he’s never attended any of my sons’ birthday parties. I think of this a lot when people ask me why I celebrate every chance I get. The answer is as simple as this—tomorrow isn’t a guarantee.

Break out the good china because it’s Tuesday. Make your husband’s favorite casserole because he beat you at Scrabble. Celebrate Mondays and Wednesdays and half birthdays. Celebrate babies and grandparents and when your eighth-grader passes chemistry. Celebrate Easter, Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, and Rosh Hashanah. Celebrate for any and every reason, because you don’t know the next time you’ll have an opportunity to celebrate and that in itself is reason enough. Today is a precious gift, and that gift is something to be celebrated.

where should you entertain? why, any old place at all!

All of my favorite childhood memories are centered on a party or gathering we had as a family. Nearly every single one of those parties was in the little red two-bedroom house that my grandparents lived in. For each of our holidays and birthdays we’d cram fifty people into a home that could comfortably fit only a handful. It was loud, there was never anywhere to sit, and between the body count and my grandparents’ need to always blast the furnace, the temperature inside rivaled Death Valley for the hottest place in the continental United States. And you know what? Nobody cared. Everyone was happy to be there to gossip and grumble and share a meal. We were excited to eat Uncle Joe’s half-moon pies or Grandma Neeley’s cherry chip cake, and the location was entirely irrelevant.

I wish we could all escape the mentality that you need the perfect house in order to have people over. Inviting friends and family into your home is one of the best gifts you can give someone else. It is the greatest measure of respect to prepare a meal for another person. Recently my friend Katie was describing someone from church I hadn’t met, and she said, “Oh, they’re actually really good friends of ours. Like, hang-out-in-the-kitchen-while-dinner-finishes-cooking kind of friends.” And I thought to myself, yes, that’s it exactly! The dinner table is sacred, and inviting someone to gather around it allows them inside your life in a way they’ll never have access to otherwise, no matter how much you keep up with their life on Facebook. It’s a real, honest attempt to share your life and build a community with those around you. So whether you’re in a mansion or an apartment or a trailer park, it’s not about where you’re hosting. It’s about the warm home you welcome your guests into.

not sure how to even begin having someone over? Well, let’s talk about where you start. You start with the Boy Scout motto: Always Be Prepared.

You need to begin collecting a menagerie of hosting paraphernalia. Just like a warrior wouldn’t go into battle without the proper armor, you, too, must be armed and ready to handle whatever the recipe or event might throw at you. If you gave me half an hour’s notice that you were dropping by my house for an impromptu cocktail, a home-cooked meal, or to introduce me to a visiting maharaja, I would be ready to wow you by the time you arrived. This isn’t because I’ve got a chef and a florist at my disposal. It’s because I’ve collected an arsenal of platters, plates, wineglasses, unique liqueurs, vintage pinots, specialty mixed nuts, and the knowledge of at least four different ways to turn regular old cheese into something divine. I’ve used them all countless times in countless ways to entertain people just like you. I’ve got a bag of tricks, and I’m constantly adding to it. So when the situation presents itself, of course you can drop by, nothing would make me happier.