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.

First meal at my MiL's, roast dinner all very normal. But as someone finished she whipped the plate away and gave them pudding while the rest of us were still on roast dinner. That was weird enough but then when I started on the cake (which was pudding) she said 'it's horrible, isn't it? I know it is. Spit it out!' and then put a paper napkin in my face and said 'spit it out into this, go on, it's horrible!' Now, it was truly very stodgy and hard to eat, but there was no way I was going to spit food out at the table. It was such an awkward moment.

@Bounce55

I love a few lumps of corned beef in piping hot tomato soup-goes all squishy

Trust me on this one

Up thread there was talk about leftovers! The other evening I found a bit of a packet of cooked rice, ditto of cous-cous, a few prawns and a couple of slices of corned beef! Fried an onion and lots of mushrooms and slung the lot in the pan, hot enough to melf the corned beef, it was heavenly!

I wonder if any of my old school friends thought me odd as my favourite part of any meal with chips was vinegar mops - a plate flooded with vinegar then white bread and butter dipped in I still love it and get through a large bottle of malt vinegar in a fortnight.

@Dontfuckingsaycheese

In the 70s I had a best friend called Suzanne. I was out their house once when they were having tea (not sure why they didn’t give me any…) but they were having sausage sandwiches 😮😮😮😮 I had just never seen a family have a tea that was so - well- in-family-tea like!!! Now of course I love a sausage sandwich! I’d think nothing of having it for tea!! How I’ve changed!!

Did she live in a place by the river?

“And she feeds you tea and sausages…”

@RosesAndHellebores how does one put cheese on a sandwich vertically?

Are these chunks or slices? If somehow put on vertically, wouldn’t they just go horizontal with a swift 90 degree turn of the plate?

If ever a diagram or picture was needed...

Tiny portions when you eat at someone's house is something I can never understand - we always cook/provide enough to feed a battalion, so paranoid are we that someone might not have enough to eat.

Partner and I went to stay with her brother and SIL in the States. After a long flight and 3 hour car drive to their house, we sat down (starving) to a home-made chilli and rice. We got one tablespoon of each on our plates (that was there there was in the pans...). No pudding. We'd taken a large box of Thorntons continental chocs for them, so handed them over and said "Let's open them, shall we?"

Has anyone seen the current TV advert where the men pour tinned tomatoes on bread and eat it?

[quote AppaTheSixLeggedFlyingBison]@JudgeJ

But surley cream with sugar and egg is custard?[/quote]
Not if the cream's cold, it was actually quite inedible, even OH who was used to her obsession with sweetening everything couldn't eat it, she was very offended!

@NeverDropYourMooncup I'm so sorry you went through that.

I have some interesting boarding school memories: toast which you could fold 3 times and put it on your plate and it would unfold. It was quite nice in its own way - just not like normal toast. We used to smuggle bread out of the dining room and stick it to an old convection(?) heater in our classroom to get 'proper' toast. Generally our food was pretty good though for an institution.

Went to visit a couple I'd lost touch with for a few years. They insisted on hosting me for a meal even though I offered, and was quite happy, to take them out. No no, they wanted to host, they enjoyed cooking, it was no bother etc. They served a half packet of filled pasta (the sort you buy in the fridge section of the supermarket) with some sauce out of a jar. The sauce wasn't even heated up. No salad, or bread, or anything. Literally just pasta out of a packet and sauce out of a packet. It tasted fine, just so bizarre after the massive fuss made about how they really wanted to cook for me.

Not really a food thing, but a generational attitude towards drinking water. My parents and DH's parents virtually refuse to drink water with meals or at any other time and hydrate exclusively on tea, coffee or alcohol. Since grandchildren arrived they have reluctantly compromised and now, for example, my FIL serves water with meals in glasses the size of a shot glass. My parents just 'forget' to provide water with meals. We all live in countries with clean tap water. I just don't get it.

@doyouwantachuffedybadge

As a child we had: sugar butties ketchup butties brown sauce butties crisp sandwiches

a pot of tea with meals is of course the norm - tea all day long is the norm surely?
as is buttered bread with soup
tinned tomatoes on toast
cold rice pudding - who the hell has it hot?!

I'll tell you what is weird, and I've seen it a few times - someone dipping bread and butter into a cup of tea. That is beyond minging.

I still love to add crisps to a ham sandwich!

Years ago I was ill so OH had to make a meal. Bless, he tried but I used to say when the programme Can't Cook, Won't Cook was on that there should be a Can't Cook But Will Cook just for him! I suggested that he got a tub of frozen bolognese sauce from the freezer that I'd bulk cooked, defrost/heat in the microwave and do some spaghetti, seemed simple. Two hours later he was still not finished,

My mum used to make a big fruit cake every Sunday to be eaten as dessert all week. It was delicious. My dad used to eat it with gravy or with a slice of cheese stuck on it.

Packed lunches often contained Cheddar cheese and strawberry jam sandwiches.

Sunday night was toast with mashed tinned sardines on top and malt vinegar shaken over it

I still eat these things and enjoy them but only when no-one's looking

@Tractordiggerdump

At a birthday party, white bread & butter with sprinkles..🤮

This is absolutely standard in Australia - probably a Dutch import, from reading other posts - you're not doing a kid's party properly if there's no fairy bread!

We don't have normal white bread in our house, as we're mostly GF, and our bread doesn't take well to this concept (well, until this year when we got a new type that is very similar to standard white plastic bread!) so MIL used to make little GF scotch pancakes for the sprinkles to go on instead. Kids liked them ok - it's still beyond me as a concept!

I have grown up eating rice with my roast dinners. Rice and gravy is the best and I prefer rice than roast potatoes!

Same here. I grew up in the "Low Country" of the US Deep South where rice is the standard starch. I much prefer rice to potatoes.

My husbands grandparents serve super noodles with Sunday dinner.

My mother in law only serves the foods she knows I don’t/can’t eat when we go to hers.

Someone I once knew used to put potatoes in her pasta dishes. She seemed quite confused when we all questioned her about it and tried to tell her the pasta was the carbs and she didn't need to add potatoes.

"I remember on the French exchange, back in the day when you just stayed at someone's house. The getting in from school snack was a hunk of baguette with a plain chocolate bar in it. That's my kind of snack" and it's delicious! Had childhood holidays in France as my dad was French. It was like a quick version of pain au chocolat. Not the healthiest, of course.

My parents had a full teapot on the table at every meal. I’ve never drunk tea, the sight of them slurping tea at every meal put me off.

MIL served tasteless mince with spaghetti. That was awful.

Friend never cooks enough. If she does roasties, I get one but DH gets two.

@ShagMeRiggins - ha ha - I get your point. I should have said lengthways or cross ways.

@Redsquirrel5

My new friend at 16 didn’t like cooked vegetables so her mum put chopped veg and green beans in a glass next to her plate.

I used to have my carrot sticks in a glass of water next to my plate. Not as odd now I can eat them cook

@Wineat5isfine

Baked beans in a shepherds pie is quite lovely.

But I simply can’t get on board with chips and gravy!

It's essentially roast potato and gravy, I've never understood the horror it inspires.

NeverDrop you poor thing, I hope you got out of that oppressive family early in your adult life

Same friend is massively stingy with a cold drink. You get a very small glass, with too much cordial in. She’s a lovely friend otherwise. 😂

@burritofan

Sausages cooked in milk. As in boiled . Or poached I suppose. With mashed potato and the hot meaty milk as gravy. Hi, I’m going to need to burn the entire internet to the ground to expunge the words “hot meaty milk”.

An ex-boyfriend’s family have Christmas mashed potatoes with chicken livers sort of blended and liquified and stirred in; they spoke of nothing else for WEEKS before we went round and this putrid thing took pride of fucking place in the middle of a fairly crap and meagre buffet, with them all circling round me smiling and nodding like a cult, encouraging me towards the livery mashed potato. Grim.

The chicken livers remind me of a friend who stuffs her roast chicken with the following mix - rice, smoked oysters, bacon and cream.

It's bloody delicious. Strangely.