Picky bits?

[HelenInHeels]

I hate this! I saw it on a M&S advert and it gave me the willies. I don't know why it sounds gross but it puts me off food as does 'dirty' fries. Yeuch!

Oh god I hate calling food a ‘spread’. I also hate the words ‘dips’ and ‘toppings’. I don’t even know what I call a ‘picky tea’. Maybe ‘cheese and biscuits and stuff’ or just ‘bits’ (sorry)

‘I’m going to make a salad and the put bread, cheese and cold meats etc on the table and people can help themselves’ is how such a meal is announced in this house.

No nickname or shorthand needed.

No, you are quite normal. MN is not.

I hate it because it sounds cutesy and twee, like when adults do baby voices. I fully accept that AIBU though.

Canapés, shurely ;-)

I don’t LOVE the expressions picky bits or picky tea but I can’t get militant about it. When kids were smaller we used to call a bit of pitta, houmous, cucumber, Babybel, slice of ham or whatever ‘bits and bobs’, but that feels like a different sort of thing to a selection of bite-size items of food for adults to, um, pick at.

Ha, we call it simply “a picky” so that’s probably pretty revolting for all of you isn’t it!

Picky bits are usually extracted from a child’s nose. Apparently they are remarkably tasty, according to DD. She can reach up as far as the second knuckle, she’s convinced that there are even tastier ones farther up if she could only get at them.

Most schools forbid the consumption of picky bits during in class. Children must wait until break time.

No problem with ‘picky bits’ here.

I’d prefer to use the term amuse-bouche, but noblesse oblige and all that.

I'd never heard the term "picky tea" but it does sound a bit weird. We've always said buffet lunch, buffet tea etc. Plates of party type food that you help yourself to. Midlands here.

The word Buffet.

My friend gives me the ick when she says ‘boo fay’

I say ‘buff ay’

We always called it a choose it tea growing up.

Picnic or mezze train here!

I think your bits and bobs is closer to the picky bits under discussion than canapés (which we call canapps) or bite-size things for adults. I don’t think picky bits is canapés or amuse-bouche at all: it’s a fridge forage and may still involve cutlery (for slicing cheese or dolloping mustard or spreading butter on a cracker, or whatever) in a way that bite-size party food wouldn’t.

We tend the call it 'party bits ' !

We have self-assembly suppers / flat pack dinners. I don't like the sound of 'picky bits', but am totally comfortably with getting the pickings from a carcass / joint after a roast dinner.

Flat Pack Supper is great!

agree with this.

My mil calls it picks and bits. Love the actual food but ffs call it something else because the name makes me shudder!

Yes you are

This thread is going to go the same way as the “anyone who drinks vodka on Christmas Day is an alcoholic horror” thread from a few days ago isn’t it.

I would say most meals between Christmas and New Year is a form of picky tea here with normal service starting as we go back to work. Although we would call it nibbles in our house

It's an awful phrase, as is picky tea 🤢.
Never heard it until the last few years.

Edit to add: the concept ' random shit from the fridge' is fine, it's the phrase that I hate

My DS misheard us and pronounces it ‘piggy bits’ which I mind less and have adopted in place of ‘picky bits’.

Ghastly. Is your nose included?

If it’s the sort of food found at a buffet that people have in the evening party for a wedding, we would call it ‘finger food’.

If it was more a selection of different hot foods that were scooped up and needed to be eaten with cutlery sitting with your plate precariously balanced on your knee away from the table, they would simply call it a buffet. My aunt who always prided herself on knowing the right way would call this a pot luck dinner. As a child, that always made me think of a tombola…but surely you knew what you were eating, you scooped it onto your plate yourself.

That aunt was more than a bit picky, she never thought anything that anybody that her immediate family did was right.

We call it a 'Granny D's tea' after DH's dearly departed granny. Picky bits is gross and scab like.

We call it 'fridge raid' (even though the large cupboard might also be raided). MN introduced me to calling it 'picky bits'. We now consider fridge raid to be a bigger, sit-down meal, whereas picky bits is more of a casual graze.

I think it's a great name! Just wash your hands before picking at whichever bits you fancy from the spread on the same.