DIY A Gourmet Dinner Party Without Spending A Dime (We Hook You Up!)

Listen up, because we're about to share a little secret that's going to blow your mind. You don't need to be a creative genius (like, say, our creative director and hostess extraordinaire, Piera Gelardi) to throw a kick-ass dinner party.

We just stumbled across a pretty amazing service that delivers you boxes full of ingredients and recipes that take all of the stress out of DIY gourmet meals. Plated sends over a box with either a single meal or a few boxes for a few different meals. (You have to order at least four plates, so you can do either two servings of two different meals, or four of one single meal. Prices range from $10 to $15 per plate, but the more you sign up for, the cheaper your meal ends up being.) That is right. You can be a person who cooks without being a person who stands in line at the grocery store.

Our favorite option, though, is the dinner party box, which runs you $104 for the five apps below, and feeds between six and eight people. Not bad — especially if it's going to keep us from running between Trader Joe's, the bodega, and Whole Foods just to assemble everything we need for one meal (and ending up with an entire bottle of celery seeds that we will never make our way through).

Enter below, sign up for R29 and Plated newsletters, so you can stay in the loop, and then wing a prayer and stay tuned. The contest is open now through 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, December 12, and we'll pick the 10 winners the following day (that's Thursday, in case you weren't sure). Plated offers delivery anywhere on the East Coast, from Boston to D.C., so everyone else: We love you, but we can't hook you up quite yet. Good luck!