how do i show only one category on the front page?

I just installed the latest version of wordpress and for whatever reason i can’t seem to figure out how to only display one category on the front page. it occurs to me that this should be a setting integrated into wordpress, but i’d be completely happy with having a simple plug-in to do this. I do realize that there are a few in the plugin repository already, but the few that i have tried warned me that they weren’t tested with the version of wordpress i’m using, and when i tried to install and activate them anyway, they didn’t work as advertised. I think this may be due to a recent change with the way categories work on the backend of wordpress… does anybody have any suggestions as to how i can go about gaining this functionality?

thanks in advance,
Josh