Nicole Schmidt, from left, Marissa Massoni, Kate Wiens, Paul Kaldahl and Nick Frisby are members of a dinner group called Community Dinners that meets four times a week for homemade meals.

Host Nick Frisby, left, points out food choices to Marianne Melling at a recent meeting of the Community Dinners nightly dinner group. Members meet Monday through Thursday for a good dinner with friends.

Four nights a week, Nick Frisby gets a good, old-fashioned family dinner.

Not bad for a doctoral student living the college life with three roommates.

Frisby is a member of a dinner party club called Community Dinners. Every night, Monday through Thursday, someone from the group signs up to hold a dinner at home. With roughly 20 members, that’s a lot of mouths to feed, but it pays off with a square meal and solid company most days of the week.

In fact, according to Frisby’s math, the dinner party group actually works to his financial advantage. He figures that he spends around $50 for each night he hosts. If he ends up hosting once a month, that means he basically gets 16 homemade dinners for $50 — plus invaluable time with good friends.

He compares the system to almost something of a co-op, where the commodity is time and the owners are buddies.

“It’s great moneywise. It’s sort of like a co-op on one level,” Frisby says. “It’s kind of like a time co-op, though. One of us cooks an entire evening once a month so that we get to eat real dinners every night.”

The dinner party group started a few years ago, when four college girlfriends decided to do what they could to replicate the family dinner table. Eventually, boyfriends and friends were invited and the group turned into a full-blown weekly event, being hosted in various homes across Lawrence each Monday through Thursday.

“Monday through Thursday is what we shoot for. But sometimes there are gaps,” he says, adding the group uses a Google calendar to keep things straight. “It’s all volunteer-based, we don’t have a fixed rotation or anything. But, since we have about 16 people, it roughly works out to cooking once a month.”

Now, it’s obvious that not everyone would have the time and the extended friend base to start their own Community Dinners-style club, but that doesn’t mean a one-off dinner party, or even a once-a-month dinner with friends is totally out of the question.

Nancy Stark, a Kansas City-based chef, says that regular dinner parties can be a fantastic way to catch up with friends and keep from losing touch. And, they really can be easy and not Thanksgiving-level difficult. Here’s how.

Plan, plan, plan. Stark, who teaches classes at The Merc, 901 S. Iowa, says that for success, it helps to be as prepared as possible, especially if you plan to cook the whole meal yourself.

“Plan your menu as far in advance as you can,” she says.

This means picking the recipes, planning the meal and creating a timeline as early as you can. Frisby recommends buying your ingredients as early as possible to avoid mad dashes to the store.

Keep it simple. Stark says that while experienced home cooks will know how much time and effort they need for a certain meal, folks with less kitchen experience might be best suited to just do the main course.

“If you’re not an experienced cook, the best approach to a dinner party is to pick one thing that you know how to do really well and that way you won’t sweat it,” she says. “Make one thing and then everything else can be easy stuff.”

Stuff like doing a prepared salad and using a store-bought baked good for dessert.

“Most of the time beginner people try to do too much and too many things and they often will pick something that they don’t really feel comfortable with,” Stark says. “And then they’re just in a dither and they don’t have any fun.”

Use your kitchen wisely. As anyone who’s ever been in the kitchen for Thanksgiving knows, cooking a multi-course meal for many can be a delicate dance of timing and oven space. Frisby says one of his tricks is to use every square inch of your kitchen, and have something easy ready just in case you end up running behind.

“How I’ve started to think about it is I try to use all the parts of my oven. I try to bake something and use the range and then, like, last night I prepared some fruit, too. It’s nice to have something easy that you can’t be late with, like fruit,” Frisby says. “Baking things, there’s usually a really big window. You put it in the oven and then start doing something on the range. So, it’s best … to do things that overlap well.”

Think carefully about potlucks. If you’d like to make dinner with friends a weekly event, Frisby suggests shying away from the potluck model if you plan on having frequent dinners.

“I think that the potlucks are less successful because you don’t always want to have to bring something,” he says, calling potlucks “overwhleming” in nature. “The format where one person cooks all the food infrequently — once a month, but otherwise you just get to go to the dinner and not worry about it — I think that’s going to be a lot better in terms of the long-term. Because with a potluck, it’s like I have to cook something every time — that’s overwhelming.”

That said, Stark suggests that if your parties are more infrequent, a themed potluck might be the most adventurous way to go. (For more on themes, see box.)

Make special concessions for the kids. Stark suggests that if kids are a must at your dinner party, to make sure they have their own menu and their own space. She likes the idea of hiring a sitter for the kids and giving them their own room for the party.

“You can make a whole separate kids menu — you can get pizza or chicken fingers or whatever and send the kids off with an adult to do something and then all the other grown-ups can have a good time and do grown-up stuff,” she says. “If you’re going to have to hire a sitter anyway, why not just team up on that and all the people who have kids can chip in?”

Don’t forget to ask about special dietary needs. If you have folks coming to the party that you don’t know that well, Stark says it’s always good to ask about diners’ special dietary needs. Also, she says it’s a good plan to have something that anyone can eat — she recommends fruit salad, as it’s a good bet for vegetarians and people with certain food allergies.