To be cheesed off about the pasta bake incident five years on

[Dangelis]

This is as light hearted as it gets, I'm not actually fuming about this! I am interested in some perspectives though.

In 2017, five friends from East Anglia and I got an Airbnb in London so we could all go to a late night event nearby. I was the first to arrive (I live in London but was bunking in with them anyway) so I went to a supermarket and got a few bags of crisps, soft drinks and some small charcuterie type stuff - enough for everyone, but mainly because I like having this kind of stuff around while I'm getting ready to go out, so I paid for it myself. I figured the others could order delivery if they wanted anything bigger.

On my friends' group chat, I'd noticed a few references to a "pasta bake" and some requests for money over the past two weeks, but I'd skimmed over these.

When my friends turned up, one of the couples (who I barely knew) arrived with THE pasta bake. I was surprised as I thought it had been a joke - and practically speaking, it sort of was. There were two huge ceramic oven dishes full of the coldest, most wet and cheese-less penne bake I'd even seen, and they'd been sitting in the back of someone's car covered in foil for over three hours, all the way from Kings Lynn to Southwark. They were carried in with GREAT fanfare by the woman of the couple, who proceeded to re-heat this huge beige thing in the oven, and then ladle big, sad, stodgy bowls of it out to everyone (not what anyone wants to try to hold and shovel down while trying to put on makeup and get into a cocktail dress!!!). She talked about the cooking process and recipe too, as if we couldn't work it out. The way this woman went about it, you'd think she thought she'd rescued the whole night from disaster and starvation. I think I attempted to navigate my way around an undercooked piece of broccoli and watery pasta for a bit before hiding it in my room. It was honestly so bizarre to watch this performance happening while the rest of us were enjoying the vibe of getting ready to go to a quite expensive and elegant night out.

So far so bland. But the next morning, the woman went around telling everyone how much the ingredients (penne pasta, broccoli, not enough tomato sauce, and cheese In Name Only) had cost and calculating how much each person in the house owed them for the privilege of being involved in THE pasta bake. I honestly can't remember if I paid up or not - I think one of my mates who was closer to them paid for a few of us out of embarrassment.

This couple are divorced now, and I haven't seen the woman since the event. I've never brought it up with my friends, but I find myself thinking about this all the time. Was I being snotty about what was, in theory, a nice but misguided gesture? Am I overestimating how much small-towners know about food availability in Central London after dark? Or was this genuinely weird and off base?

Will someone please send me a nice pasta bake recipe that doesn't have garlic in it (or anchovies)?

You're on the naughty step, OP. Here, have some banana traybake to cheer you up. Or lentil soup guaranteed untouched by a mammalian molecule. But I'm afraid the empanadas are all taken.

Five minutes of my life I'll never get back reading OP's posts. Could someone save the lunch break and post a nice pasta bake recipe, please? Preferably vegetarian, I enjoy olives and aubergines 😄

I made the following the other day: make up a white sauce using vegetable stock instead of milk, about 700ml of stick, 70g butter and flour. Can do it with milk I just didn't have much.Hard boil and peel 6 eggs. Defrost half a kilo of frozen spinach leaves in the microwave. Put 500g of fresh gnocchi in a baking dish (no need to precook), pour over the white sauce, mix with the spinach. Have the eggs, place on top, grate over a big pile of cheddar (much as you like) and cook at 180 for 15-20 minutes, or until the cheese is nice and crispy.

1. I understand how something so trivial can linger in the memory and still puzzle you years later. When my children were little it was my turn to host a play/coffee morning for my friends and their toddlers. One of a set of mugs went missing and was never seen again. It wasn't in the kitchen bin (where someone might have put it if they'd broken it and were embarrassed to tell me - but I'm not at all scary!). I thought we'd find it when we moved a year later...somewhere...but we didn't. It's mind-blowingly inconsequential but it comes back to me occasionally because it's just so bizarre. I was around nearly all the time - so if there'd been an accident of some kind I'd have been aware (my house was tiny and the kitchen was almost in the living room). It was winter and no-one went outside, or even moved from their chair. The mug wasn't a nice one that anyone, least of all a good friend, would want to nick.

2. on the topic of inappropriate food, I have a good old friend who doesn't enjoy cooking or entertaining and that's fine - she's a lovely generous person in other ways. But EVERY time she's invited by our group of friends to a meal at someone's house she brings 2 carrier bags of cakes and biscuits from M & S. A kind thought, but very difficult to use on the occasions I'm thinking of - dinner parties. The host is then left with a massive consignment of highly calorific snacks and a dilemma as to what to do with them. Sometimes you can 'tactfully' share them out for people to take home, but....she does it repeatedly, despite hints about 'no need to bring any food - there'll be loads!' etc. I wouldn't waste them but I do feel exasperated sometimes!

I wouldn't have eaten it. I keep thinking of Susan's offerings in Desperate Housewives.

Not read the full thread, but I'm with you op. Who wants to eat fucking pasta bake while getting ready, and why would she need to pre-make it? If she was so hell bent on making it, why didn't they stop at a supermarket, or bring the ingredients and make it when they go tthere, then it might not have been so bad. I would not have eaten that. And I wouldn't have chipped in towards it either. The woman is fucking bizarre.

High Six to you all from here in Norfolk!

😁

😂 I think you’re funny, OP. Ignore the fault-finders on here. They probably just take ceremonial pasta bakes (in smart ceramic-ware) with them wherever they go, expecting praise and plaudits, and you’ve hit a nerve.

I have to know, how old was/is the poor sad act with the pasta bake?

Also, I like a salty charcuterie, fromagerie and crisp array when getting ready. Enough to get a thirst on and create a good greasy barrier to the incoming booze. 👍🏻

I hate when people bring their dreary homecooked offerings to these kinds of outings. You should find this woman, commiserate with her about the divorce, and then casually drop in 'so about that depressing pasta offering from five years ago...'

What is it with pasta bakes? A similar thing happened on a group holiday, a relative insisted on cooking each dinner regardless of anyone else’s tastes or preferences. And by insisted I mean would buy all the ingredients each day and tell us they were cooking and how much we owed. For the sake of peace we meekly are and paid up after our pleas of ‘please please stop’ fell on deaf ears. It all came to a head when we were all asked for 50p (this was in the late 1990s) for a sausage pasta bake which only had one sausage in per person. After that we all went out for dinner in smaller groups. Although I do look back at someone else cooking for me rather wistfully now, after 20 years of parenthood…

Other people's behaviour over food is often weird and/or funny. Anyone else remember the glorious pom-bears story from yesteryear? The OP and her husband had gone to a very posh house for dinner where they were served Heinz tomato soup for starter, followed by macaroni cheese and then trifle, if memory serves.

My mum was evacuated to King’s Lynn during the war.
I made a sausage pasta bake on Friday. My dgs wolfed it down and said it was ‘banging’.
My aunt used to make a thing with lime jelly and pear halves out of a tin called ‘mice in a field’. I’m just sorry I said I liked it once.

My mum was evacuated to King’s Lynn during the war.
I made a sausage pasta bake on Friday.

I like to think there's a link between the two

Well I for one an enjoying the thread and it's store of food related anecdotes and petty grudges. Here's my contribution which I've been dwelling on for more nearly 40 years (so I must be really small minded!). The great Gazpatcho Incident of 1984...

To set the scene, I am in my early 20s and obscenely proud of having belatedly passed my driving test on the 4th attempt and bought my first car, a rather battered ford fiesta. My parents are typical of their war-time vintage, my mum is a reasonable but disinterested plain home cook of the meat and 2 veg variety, my dad doesn't know one end of a spatula from another but fancies himself something of a 'gourmande' because he once ate some garlic prawns in Venice...

It's my Dad's 60th birthday and we are holding a party for him in the local community hall, he fondly imagines this will be a sophisticated evening with the men in bow ties and the women in long dresses, cocktails, a jazz band playing in the background, you can picture the scene. Quite why he imagines this is a mystery, since the guests are Peter and Kim from down the road and Brian and the lads from the golf club, and every other birthday party we have attended in said community hall has involved balloons, a buffet 'spread' of beige foods, Keith with his 'mobile disco' on tunes, cider in plastic cups with day-glo coloured 'pop for the little uns', sticky floors and the whole thing ending at 9pm when someone (usually but not always, one of the kids) being lavishly sick on the dance-floor. But there we are, we all have our dreams.

The week before this soiree of sophistication, Mum has been getting more and more agitated by the production of the 'spread' which has involved many 80s Good Housekeeping receipes and 'top tips' about things like jelly moulds and pre-freezing your sarnies, and much frenzied running to the neighbours to secure use of their fridges or hostess trollies or whatnot. With only a few days to go, my Dad casually asks my Mum what soup she is serving at the party? Mum answers, getting gradually more and more tetchy, that as he well knows, there will be no hot food on the 'spread' as Dick (yes, really), the ancient and ill tempered caretaker, has declared that since someone clogged the sink at the last party at the hall, the kitchen will be locked and there will be no cooking facilities, cold food only. Besides, who wants soup with their cheese cubes on cocktail sticks and cold poached salmon with artfully cut cucumber garnish? My Dad is crestfallen and insists no evening party is complete without soup (??). He then proceeds to fetch the New Larousse Gastronomie book from the shelf (which is kept purely for show, no recipe from it has ever before been cooked in our house) and shows my Mum that on the continent, soup served cold is a 'thing'. She eventually relents and with much resentful banging and clattering (and remember how much harder cooking was in the 80s, I don't think she had an electronic blender for instance and she would certainly have had to visit several shops to get the ingredients), she eventually produces a dubious looking basic of cold bright red liquid with chunks of stuff which is, apparently 'gazpacho'. It's in one of those classic vomit-coloured plastic bowls with a pouring lid, possibly purchased at a Tupperware Party. My brother and I are highly doubtful of the wisdom of serving such a thing to the suburbanites of our neighbourhood but Dad insists.

On the Great Day I proudly offer to transport us with all the food to the hall (which is only a 10 min walk away) in my car. Mum and I spend ages arranging all the food so it doesn't get squashed. To ensure there is no chance of even the slightest drop of dubious soup spoiling the hallowed interior of the Fiesta, I insist someone has to sit wedging the soup basin between their knees. To complete the picture in your imagination, Dad is wearing an impeccably tailored white dinner jacket, he thinks he's Roger Moore playing 007 or something. He wants to sit in the front so is given the basin to hold. I drive the Fiesta and it's precious cargo the tiny distance to the hall incredibly slowly and carefully, but not being a terribly confident parker yet, I swing rather too violently into the car park, Mum has unfortunately (or perhaps on purpose, in revenge although she denies this later) left the basin lid the tiniest bit loose and my rapid turn dislodges it. My Dad howls in horror, unfortunately causing me to stamp the breaks and, well, you can imagine the scene. The soup, the dinner jacket, the precious interiors of my car, the tears, the recriminations and mutual blame ... Not the very happiest birthday ever, and I'm sure the MN armchair psychologists can have a field day on what it says about our family dynamics and I still replay that horrifying moment to this day, I believe I'll take it to the grave (I know my Mum did )

YABU to be this emotionally invested in something that happened 6 years ago.

Brilliant! And so well told. Thank you for this!

@maxelly Your recounting of the gazpacho incident is worthy of a scene in a tv show. Reminds me of the reunion episode in Derry Girls even though it’s a decade off.

Don’t forget the “tinnies” soft drink and crisps (I’m guessing nik naks) that the op splurged on

Oh this thread just reminded me I have an old food related grudge too
A friend’s birthday in a big old house, about 8-10 couples staying overnight. We all chipped in for food, including breakfast next day. Had a great party that night and DH and I overslept/hungover.
Went downstairs around 09:30, so not that late, smelling bacon and toast, mouths watering - oh sorry there’s no breakfast left for you!
Grrr I’m still mad 15 years later 😂

Yes, I still laugh and cringe about things that happened longer than a month ago.

What an odd accusation.

Why are people still wittering about the charcuterie? OP nevertold anyone she had bought charcuterie!
What is wrong with buying drinks and snacks that she wanted, but enough for everyone, and NOT asking anyone to contribute?

It doesn't look like you even know what you are being sneery about.

@maxelly, I weep for your poor Dad's white tux. I hope someone nipped home and got him a clean jumper

What accusation?

So you think about things from over a month ago but less than 5 years ago? And anyone who thinks about things from longer than that is weird? You're not making a lot of sense.