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.

@cookiemonster5 there are a number of classic Italian pasta dishes with potatoes added in

My (very health conscious) MIL cooks a normal lovely chicken casserole and then will plunge the whole pot into a massive bowl of ice from her ice maker. This is to make the fat (ie the flavour) rise to the surface which she will then scrape off and throw away.

I'm seeing lots of perfectly normal things here. Sliced bread with soup. Bread and butter with meals. Cup of tea with a meal. Beans in cottage pie. Cold rice pudding out the tin. An average week at my grandparents house as a kid. I still like these now.

@ImFree2doasiwant

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

That genuinely makes me want to 🤮

My mum's 'speciality' is corned beef casserole in the slow cooker. When the lid is lifted, you're hit with an aroma reminiscent of nursing homes, and the sight of brown watery slop with pink spume atop. She makes enough for a week for herself, microwaving a bowlful each evening.

I'd forgotten corned beef exists. Going to make a corn beef and potatoe pie tonight. Served with baked beans!

Maybe I'll try it with a cup of tea.....although I do think tea with dinner is weird. Always after!

My MIL still bases all cooking on the recipes she learnt at school in the 1950s. Gravy is made by adding flour to the water used to boil the veg and she always makes Yorkshire puddings with self raising flour. I am convinced that she made mistakes copying the recipes and has continued to follow the flawed recipes for the last 65yrs.
I was lucky to have a mother who was a fantastic cook and skilled baker. Although she did used to make a weird concoction called porcupine meatballs made with tomato soup,rice and mince mixed up and made into meatballs then cooked in more tomato soup, yuk. To be fair it was a recipe she was given.

Oh and ExH’s dad makes potato pie- which from what I can see is just mash with cheese on grilled (compared to some pp’s dishes this is haute cuisine!) he used to make it for the boys if ExMil was working late with baked beans.
@5thnonblonde
When I was at school the dinnerladies used to make this every so often for school dinners. I make a version of it for my kids if they’re feeling under the weather - they love it!

Dh would feel cheated if I made a shepherd’s/cottage pie without baked beans.

Last night I added a couple of tablespoons of BBs to some leftover homemade chilli, to have in wraps, too. There wasn’t quite enough without. A little extra hot chilli powder and it went down fine.

Buttered bread with soup is normal!
My Mum used to do a buffet type meal with cold baked beans - I loved them! But then I do like to eat quite a lot of cooked foods cold eg pizza, curry, Chinese etc. DH thinks I’m strange!

Baked beans in the cottage pie.

I've done that, it's a good way of expanding the pie!

I went for tea at a friend’s when I was about 9 & it was all sweet stuff. I enjoyed it but it was odd not to have a savoury course first.

Mince and mash at a friends house. No seasoning. She washed the mince under the Tap before serving it and served it grey with lumpy mash.

@Figgit

Oh and ExH’s dad makes potato pie- which from what I can see is just mash with cheese on grilled (compared to some pp’s dishes this is haute cuisine!) he used to make it for the boys if ExMil was working late with baked beans. *@5thnonblonde* When I was at school the dinnerladies used to make this every so often for school dinners. I make a version of it for my kids if they’re feeling under the weather - they love it!

Ditto, though the cheese is mixed into the potato rather than just put on top.. With a decent amount of cheese plus onions to add texture, it's great. Sometimes I put tomatoes in as well.

@Ididanamechange

My brother and sil serve the smallest portions of food. I once went for lunch at theirs and got served a tuna sandwich. One slice of thin bread with a smearing of tuna on top. No mayo. Its not a price issue as they're fairly well off and generous in all other areas but when it comes to food we know to either eat before we get there or plan a mcdonalds on the way home

So do mine! Admittedly DH and I do eat a fair amount but whenever I'm at DB and SIL, they serve the smallest portions ever! Last time we were there, they served a dish with rice and they did an amount that DH and I would normally share - but it was for 6 people Always head for the Golden Arches on the way home

In fact I’m going to make a batch of ‘school dinner’ mince later, which will have some of those BBs added. It’s still a favourite of dh, only nowadays my version usually has red lentils added, too, plus finely chopped carrot, celery and mushrooms.

@cantgetmyheadroundit

What's weird about sliced white bread with soup?

That's what I was thinking! I don't want any soup that isn't served with slabs or bread and butter 😂

Growing up in late 60s/70s tea would occasionally be 'roast cheese ' which was slices of cheese on a green Pyrex plate and grilled...just that and of course every meal had white sliced buttered bread on plate in middle of table.

Always had baked beans in shepherds pie.

Tined fruit cocktail and evaporated milk

Worst was poached fish....a piece of white fish, poached in milk and all of it served in a bowl.

Anyone remember Virol? - thick brown substance...I had to have a spoon of that every morning - it was delicious though.

I have some interesting boarding school memories: toast which you could fold 3 times and put it on your plate and it would unfold.

Mine include what we called fish feet - i.e. expanded fish fingers. Also Kennomeat pie - I suppose it was meant to be cottage pie, but whatever the meat was that they used, it was disgusting. For years I couldn't eat macaroni cheese because the school version was incredibly stodgy, tasteless and revolting. They also did something to turnips which made them really nasty. On Sundays, often we could only work out what the roast meat was by the sauce that accompanied it - if there was mint sauce, we assumed it was lamb but you really couldn't tell from the meat itself.

@cantgetmyheadroundit

What's weird about sliced white bread with soup?

Absolutely no idea either. Bread belongs with soup.

I think it's snobbery about it being sliced white bread specifically.
But hey, if it's good enough for Nigella Lawson...

Wonder if some of these things are a 'class' issue? Growing up working class in Lancashire some years ago it was normal to have sliced white bread with soup (and many other meals, chip butty etc), to drink tea with meals, to have little idea of what a proper salad was. I still have tea with certain meals contains chips or bacon, it just goes ... Had a friend who put tomato ketchup on salad, and a friend whose huge Polish dad amazed me by having everything double strength - my friend had to make his tea, toast for breakfast before she was allowed to come out with me, and he had two teabags, two spoons of coffee in each cup, two slices of bread together in one toaster slot, etc.
My own family's weird contribution to this is 'cheese dip', which I still eat to this day. On Sundays mum would fry sausages, then bacon, then in the same pan, put crumbled Lancashire cheese and milk, heated until the cheese melted. With bacon, sausage and hunks of bread to dip, it is heavenly.

@Figgit

Oh and ExH’s dad makes potato pie- which from what I can see is just mash with cheese on grilled (compared to some pp’s dishes this is haute cuisine!) he used to make it for the boys if ExMil was working late with baked beans. *@5thnonblonde* When I was at school the dinnerladies used to make this every so often for school dinners. I make a version of it for my kids if they’re feeling under the weather - they love it!

‘Cheese and potato pie’ is on the menu at my kids school… one of mine said ‘well there isn’t any pie, it’s just mashed potato and cheese’. No way I was paying £2.35 for a portion of that so they have a packed lunch that day.

My in-laws did lots of things that seemed odd to me, but their background was in catering so it may well have been me that was wrong.

They always, always put everything in a line of bowls in the kitchen and you had to serve yourself. There was literally one exception - once FIL cooked something really simple (I think something like gammon and chips) and dished it up, and MIL told him off! We, as visitors (even though we were close family) always had to go into the kitchen and serve ourselves first. When we came back, they encouraged us to start eating straight away and they would then go and serve themselves. They faffed a lot while serving themselves, so we'd sometimes have finished by the time we came back, at which point they would urge us to go back and take a second helping. They always made twice as much as was needed - MIL herself ate very small amounts and FIL about average, certainly not excessive amounts. I think they must have imagined that everyone else but them was an absolute glutton!

There was always wine, even at lunchtime, and since DH usually drove and refused to drink anything at all when driving, I was strongly urged to drink quite a lot. The only way to stop FIL constantly topping up my glass whether I liked it or not was not to drink any of it at all until the whole meal was nearly over.

MIL went on offering me cream with everything the whole time I knew her and she still cooked, even though I clearly stated every time that I didn't like cream. At least she didn't just put it on without asking. She even offered me cream with yoghurt, every time.

When we weren't actually eating a meal, MIL was constantly bringing out trays of various kinds of snack foods, depending on the time of day - cake, bowls of salty snacks, etc. If you didn't take any for a while she would hold the bowl or plate out to you and even if you said no thanks several times, it would still keep coming around again.

Anything that was buttered had far too much butter on it. My grown-up DC still refer to putting a lot of butter on something as Granny-buttering it.

If we stayed with them or went on holiday with them there was a full cooked breakfast every day and the bacon was always fried. I don't really like fried bacon so I asked if it would be possible to have mine grilled. One morning I wandered into the kitchen before MIL started cooking and I saw my bacon sitting under the grill waiting to be started... with a pat of butter on top of it!

The actual dishes and combinations weren't that weird, though they were usually a bit more elaborate than what I was used to from my family - it was as if every day was a special day. My MIL told me a method of making roast potatoes that I still use to this day and am very grateful for. I just get the sense that they associated food with kindness, and rejection of food with rejection of them.