Strange catering habits you have experienced when eating at friends/family houses?

[Chicchicchicchiclana]

The grazing table thread inspired me! I know one should always be grateful when people invite you to eat with them (and I am!!) but I find it interesting the great variety of ways people do the hosting. Have any memorable dining experiences in other people's houses really stuck with you? Without being mean of course.

ILs turned up 2 hours early for lunch once and took the fact that lunch wasn't ready as an indicator that I didn't know how to cook. Cue much bustling about the kitchen, exasperated noises and a wholly unnecessary trip to the supermarket to buy pork pies and baked beans. I had everything in for homemade quiche and salad or some such. They then brought the same thing every time they came round and MIL insisted on cooking because "36 doesn't know how to, we all remember that time we had to rescue lunch".

Lol. This reminds me a bit of my MIL (who I generally got on with)
Every time they came to our house they brought food either just for themselves, or a dish for everyone (eg a shepherds pie or casserole) even if I'd invited them at (insert time) for a meal. Im sure it was meant out of kindness but it just felt they either didn't think I could cook, or didn't like my food. On the rare occasions I was allowed to cook in my own kitchen they would always be very complimentary but in a really shocked way. "Oh actually this is really nice" (who'd have thought Fiz was able to make a roast dinner on her own)

Crushed up crisps on a pasta bake. hmm

We have this on tuna bake:
Tinned tuna
Pasta
Condensed mushroom soup
Tarragon
Prawn cocktail crisps

Drain, cook, heat, mix. Put in a shallow dish, sprinkle with cheese, crush up prawn cocktail crisps and sprinkle on top of cheese. Put under the grill.

Do not on any account serve with salad. This is a meal to stick to your ribs and ready in about 25 minutes.

I've just remembered that when I was a child Dad would drink the juice out of the mushy peas tin.

@GnomeDePlume

Crushed up crisps on a pasta bake. hmm

We have this on tuna bake:
Tinned tuna
Pasta
Condensed mushroom soup
Tarragon
Prawn cocktail crisps

Drain, cook, heat, mix. Put in a shallow dish, sprinkle with cheese, crush up prawn cocktail crisps and sprinkle on top of cheese. Put under the grill.

Do not on any account serve with salad. This is a meal to stick to your ribs and ready in about 25 minutes.

OMG I have saved that one for future reference, it sounds heavenly!!

@PaulaTrilloe gestampte muisjes stamped on mouse poo

Traditional way of announcing the birth/sex of a new baby to colleagues or school mates is to bring in rusks decorated with the appropriately coloured gestampte muisjes.

@Standrewsschool

I know an elderly couple who still lay a breakfast table, have their main meal at lunch and have tea in the evening - bread, jam, cheese, cake etc, with tea.

Perfectly normal

@Figgit

My DH and his family eat mashed potato doused in vinegar. My jaw dropped the first time I saw them do it.

Soaks the vinegar up I suppose.

@MrsTerryPratchett

My late MIL.

Roasts a chicken for too long, then slices it, removes the skin, leaves it in a plate in the oven. Driest meat I've every tasted. Like a meaty Ryvita.

Meaty ryvita is the best phrase I’ve heard in long time, made me chuckle so thank you. Would also be a great band name

@ImFree2doasiwant

Sausages cooked in milk. As in boiled . Or poached I suppose. With mashed potato and the hot meaty milk as gravy.

I honestly feel sick thinking about this meal 🤢

@DroopyClematis

White bread and butter was always served at tea time in the 60s and 70s when I grew up. Not in my house much as we were foreigners but always at my friends houses. I think it harked back to the days of rationing as if you didn't have enough meat to fill you then you could fill up on bread and butter.

I did find it odd though that when we were served tinned fruit cocktail, more bread and butter would be served up.

Oh, and why would you just have a bowl of soup? Bread with/without butter is essential as
1 you need to dunk into your soup
2 you need bread to mop up the remnants

I had nothing but sliced white bread until I left home at 18 (working class childhood and no money). In our house, and my nan's when we visited, it was definitely to fill you up. We had it with all meals. My nan and granddad, and sometimes my parents, would always have builders tea with their evening meal too.

I still love sliced white with tinned oxtail or tomato soup.

I'm in my 50s and so much of this seems normal to me! I feel quite nostalgic.

My friend's mum used to make us Mars Bar sandwiches. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven as a child as my mum had no interest in food or cooking so in my house a sandwich was either jam or jam. Choice of flavours.

Went to dinner with friends of husband. We were served salmon the husband had his covered in brown gravy that's the way he liked it fortunately ours came without the brown stuff!

I had a friend who was a tiny little scrap of a woman. When we went round for sunday lunch she served everything in bowls to help yourself, but there was very very little food. Think 5 roast potatoes, 4 carrots, a few spoonfuls of peas etc ... for 7 or 8 people. It was so awkward helping yourself to 4 peas and cutting a roast potato in half.

Always used to get a takeaway on the way home.

FIL eats his breakfast cereal with fizzy drink instead of milk.

Fried toasties are the best! Just with a bit of butter or Mayo spread on the outside of the bread and dry fried, not in lard 🤢

My mum recounts having pigs trotters once a week growing up, thank goodness we missed out on that. She did used to put crushed up crisps on tuna pasta bake though, it’s quite nice!

I’ve hear people rave about vinegar on a jacket potato so not much of a stretch to put it on mash…

Thinking back, in my childhood there was definitely a lot of sliced white bread and butter. Breakfast (bread and marmalade), lunch (paste sandwiches), and with tea/dinner/supper. Sometimes tea was beans on toast or cheese on toast. So much bloody white bread.

I wonder if that's what screwed my metabolism up ...? It's crap.

I did find it odd though that when we were served tinned fruit cocktail, more bread and butter would be served up.

My father had that as a Sunday treat when he was a child. The bread and butter was to make it go further as it was expensive and money was short in rural Wales.

Fruit crumble at childhood friend's house - we were told it was "a game" to see who found the most plum stones in our crumble, most around the edge of the bowl at the end of the meal won

We still do this. Does no one play "Tinker Tailor" any more? We always used to cheat to make sure we ended up on "rich man"

As a teenager, mum had various ways of making food stretch! the one I hated by far was her making the family tea (8 of us). It consisted of 1 tea bag in a massive saucepan of boiling water. It'd be left to boil for about 30mins. A dose of milk and sprinkling of sugar added. Then everyone will spoon some into their cup. It tasted like how I imagine dishwater.

@SiobhanSharpe

I went to boarding school in the 60s and the food was mostly dire. A regular evening meal was tinned tomatoes on toast, nothing else.But we were hungry teenage girls and wolfed it down. I quite like it these days As for the sausages cooked in milk mentioned upthread, we used to be given something similar, -- a stew of smallish, skinless 'value' type sausages cooked in a greige liquid made of milk thickened with potatoes.. We used to call it boiled babies' arms.

Ah tales of revolting boarding school food...

We got foul apple snow that was basically cooked cooking apple mashed, no sugar and not very well prepared so full of "fingernails". Stews all the time, fatty abd rancid.
Plus the natural dessert for your Babies' Arm - Babies' Leg. Jam roly poly 🤢

My Father drinks coffee with some of his meals, which confuses the hell out of French, Italian and Spnaish people.

@MissAmbrosia

Egg and chips done well is thing of beauty.

No one did eggs and chips like my nan, with a bit of her home made mustard pickle on the side. Yummm and if i was lucky some corned beef i would dip in my egg.

I just can't get my chips to go like hers. It sounds funny but it's one of the things i really miss about her.

I had a few friends growing up that did the whole serve yourself thing from the bowls on the table, that was always weird to me as a kid, only ever saw it in American movies. Australian here (British grandparents)

I miss the chip pan full stop. If it didn't scare me witless, I'd do chips how my mum did. Delicious.

Sliced bread with soup is wrong because it doesn’t have enough structural integrity when dunked. For this reason it needs to be a roll or chunk of crusty bread. I can’t stand sliced white bread anyway but this also applies to sliced wholemeal bread

All these tea talk reminds me that MIL used to boil her tea all day on the stove. She would top it up with water and the odd teabag. It was foul. It tasted like metal and occasionally the pots would explode if left to boil dry.!She was furious when the bottom fell off the last pot and she couldn’t find a suitable replacement.

I had a friend as a child whose family never drank anything with meals. They also seemed to drink everything from mugs. So if I went round after school for my tea, we would have a mug of water or Ribena or a fizzy drink when we got in, but when we sat down a couple of hours later to our egg and chips (or whatever we were eating) there was never any drink offered. I was always too shy to ask her mum for a drink, and I remember frequently not being able to finish my meal without something to wash it down.