There is a belief that hosting a dinner means producing restaurant food from your own kitchen. It does not. Some of the best dinners happen at the homes of people who can barely manage toast. The trick is not getting better at cooking. It is designing the night so cooking matters less.
Cook one thing, buy the rest
Pick a single dish you can do reliably and build the meal around it. A big pot of pasta, a tray of roast vegetables, a curry from a jar that you have quietly improved. One hot thing you control. Everything else comes from a shop: good bread, olives, cheese, a salad in a bag that you dress yourself, a dessert from the bakery. Nobody has ever left a dinner disappointed that the bread was bought rather than baked.
Make it a format, not a performance
Tacos, a build your own pizza night, a cheese and charcuterie spread, a big salad bar. Formats do the work for you. People assemble their own plates, the pressure of timing six components to land at once disappears, and there is a built in activity in the assembling. You become the person who set it up rather than the person sweating over a pass.
Let people bring things
The instinct when you cannot cook is to apologise and over compensate. Do the opposite. Tell people it is a shared effort. When you set up the event, turn on the things to bring option and put one or two items on it: a bottle, a dessert, a side. Most guests would rather contribute than arrive empty handed, and it spreads the load so no single dish has to carry the night.
Spend your effort on the room, not the food
The things people actually remember are the lighting, the music, and whether they felt welcome. A couple of lamps instead of the overhead light, a playlist queued before anyone arrives, a clear drink in someone's hand within a minute of the door opening. These cost almost nothing and they set the night more than the meal does. A mediocre dinner in a warm room beats an ambitious dinner in a cold one.
Get the logistics off your plate
The other half of a relaxed dinner is not chasing replies. Create the event, send the link, and let the RSVPs come back on their own so you know how many to shop for. Set it up once, share it in whatever chat your friends already use, and spend the day cooking your one thing instead of texting people to ask if they are still coming.
You do not need to cook well to feed your friends. You need a plan that is honest about what you can do and generous about everything else.