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.

@ladymalfoy

When 8 months pregnant my DH and I went to SIL's house for a pre Christmas meal ( I was due Boxing Day). she plated up everybody's food and served me last. I was presented with (I kid you not) one roast potato,three sliced carrots,two sprouts,a pig WITHOUT its blanket and a very small slice of turkey. My DMIL was livid and a very fierce yet quiet argument ensued in the kitchen. DMIL floated back into the dining room and swept my plate away to replace it with a rather more generous selection of all the food the rest of the family were allowed to eat.

Why did she do that to you?

It’s horrible.

@itsharderthanithought89 Back in the day the skin on the baked rice pudding was often considered the best bit. Especially if it contained lots of butter-bubbles and a good sprinkling of nutmeg.

Each to their own, I guess, and who are we to judge?

@ineedtostop

Fish finger sandwich. Had never even conceived of such a thing before I came to live in the UK. Since then, I'd heard of it, but never seen it. Until a couple of weeks ago when my very gastronomic partner decided what he really craved was a fish finger sandwich... ordered one in a cafe... and ate it. I was stunned. Fish fingers in a sandwich!!!

Try fish finger on toast. So good!

@waterlego

This? images.app.goo.gl/C1ZkC3ummnhxPVMY7

@Tractordiggerdump

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

Fairy bread - is an Australian delicacy 😉

Always very happy when other people cook for me. The oddest thing I remember was visiting a friend's house in SW America for Sunday lunch and the pudding was placed on the table with the other dishes and everyone filled their plates with the main and dessert at the same time.

Closer to home, my DH made a cottage pie the other week and added baked beans. I thought that was very weird, but reading this thread it seems quite a regular addition.

Stones in plum crumble totally normal. I also remember doing counting rhymes with them. Tea with a meal normal in Yorkshire. Iced bun as pudding sounds great! Sausages in milk is just horrible though!

Fish finger sandwiches with balsamic vinegar, good hangover food

Many years ago I was invited to boyfriends house for Boxing day lunch and was told 'it will just be cold meat & pickles' I assumed it would be the same as we always had on Boxing day - buffet with cold meats, salads, prawns etc, etc. No - just cold turkey, mashed potatoes and a jar of pickled onions, the most insipid meal I've ever attempted to eat🤢
Same

A friend of my DH invited us to dinner. He had made a Brussels sprout curry so thick you could stand a spoon up in it and served it straight from the pan. After he had cleared it away he said 'I suppose you're expecting pudding' and put a half eaten packet of Jaffa Cakes on the table.

MIL used to lick her fingers while fielding stray roasties from the pan.

Thankfully we're now NC but I used to dig deeeep back in the day

We recently went for dinner at friends and discovered they bin leftovers immediately Personally I've nothing against letting them mature for two or fourso days especially when it's the nuclear proof frozen offerings we they favour

My dad always served Heinz tomato soup with an Oxo cube crumbled on the top (and with buttered white bread on the side which of course is normal).

My best friend at Primary school had sliced banana, brown sugar and hundreds-and-thousands sandwiches in her packed lunch every day.

My mum puts raisins in everything... salads, all puddings, curries. And slices of apple with just about every meal.

My DP thinks jam on toast is a lunch food, when it is very plainly a breakfast.

Also remembered an evening where we sat on the five cat's favoured sofa and went home like yeti.

That was the one where our gift wine bottle went MIA and the host's bottle did four...

[quote Anothermuddywalk]We did it too, and used to say the "tinker tailor" rhyme as we counted them. A quick Google suggests it was a traditional thing www.agefotostock.com/age/en/details-photo/boy-and-girl-counting-plum-stones-on-a-plate-tinker-tailor-etc/MEV-11079104[/quote]
Thank you 🤗

Despite people saying they counted stones etc I didn't connect it with my childhood until your post! I have a terrible memory & it's lovely when a bit of it is unlocked x

I remember, some years ago ( am reminded by a previous poster who vaulted at porridge/porage with salt in it.
Many Scottish folk think salted porridge is usual which is perfect.

However, I worked in a school ( in SE England) and a few years ago I had set up a tasting station ( and yes, parents' authority was daughter!) where we had to choose the best tasting porridge. ( I had previously been warned about a child who had severe food sensory issues, by the way.)

So I had a bowl of plain porridge, a bowl of salted porridge and a bowl of sugar-sweetened porridge.
All 90 children in the year group took part, including the food phobic child whose mum said that he wouldn't.

Bottom choice was sweetened.
Plain porridge was middle .
Salted porridge came top, including food sensory child who wanted more! ( Mum thought it was a gimmick and dismissed it 🙄)

Just goes to show.

My PIL can’t tolerate anyone having something slightly different, or a different amount.
E.g. vegetarians having veggie sausages whilst others have pork ones - all must have the same
MIL often heard to say things like ‘there are 4 pieces of cheese each’ with the expectation everyone will a) want the cheese b) want exactly 4 pieces
They also don’t like people getting drinks outside ‘the normal’ times…

My colleagues inlaws part-cook the turkey on Christmas eve, let it "rest" overnight and finish it off the next day.

She's never eaten Christmas dinner with them and does not know how they haven't all died from food poisoning.

@wigglerose

My colleagues inlaws part-cook the turkey on Christmas eve, let it "rest" overnight and finish it off the next day.

She's never eaten Christmas dinner with them and does not know how they haven't all died from food poisoning.

🤢

[quote Anothermuddywalk]We did it too, and used to say the "tinker tailor" rhyme as we counted them. A quick Google suggests it was a traditional thing www.agefotostock.com/age/en/details-photo/boy-and-girl-counting-plum-stones-on-a-plate-tinker-tailor-etc/MEV-11079104[/quote]
In laws have several plum, damson and greengage trees so my kids have grown up with ‘tinker tailor’ crumble, so,etching I never had as a child!

@Kefirazy

Crisps with a sit down meal!

My MIL serves up perfectly normal lunches - say, soup or lasagne with a salad - and they almost ALWAYS have a bowl of crisps with them.

I grew up with crisps as distinctly party food, or a snack you buy from a newsagent before getting on a train. Definitely not actual food that comes in an actual meal.

@Kefirazy - Sometimes in England, you can find game, or game pie, served with "game chips", which as far as I'm concerned, are warmed up fancy crisps!

I’ll take your buttered Weetabix and raise you buttered Weetabix with marmite. Delicious!

More mean than funny, but a story from.my university years and my first proper boyfriend, who came with the parents from hell.

They were senior army and lived overseas for years and then retired when my boyfriend was 19, returned (oh god), bought an ugly box of a house miles from anywhere in the Yorkshire Dales and started treating their son like the eleven year old he was when they dumped him in boarding school.

They instantly hated me, and particularly that I was vegetarian, which they regarded as some kind of lower class thing.

We spent that Christmas with them visiting the horrible house in the hills which had been expensively redecorated in the creepiest of grandma chic - and bear in mind that they were terrifying. You couldn't help yourself to a glass of water, let alone a cup of tea. The MIL watched the kitchen and her own weight like a hawk. I swear she had an eating disorder, but also, she was just plain horrible, like something out of Roald Dahl. I was a smart and sunny size 10 kid with a bright future, and all I ever heard from her as a guest was how I wouldn't want a biscuit because I should be 'slimming.'

We got to them 'too late' on Christmas Eve for dinner (6pm).

Christmas day breakfast was a small and grudging bowl of muesli, after which we were expected to wait for dinner at 4pm. No chocolates, no snacks, no wine (of course, they were too mean to drink). Apart from the Queen's speech, no television. I think I remember no presents, but just the sound of a very loud ticking clock as we all sat and looked at each other.

They had beef. My dinner was a bag of salad.

I mean that 100%. A bag of salad put on the table IN THE BAG. The roast potatoes, gravy, all sides cooked in lard. She was 'out of bread' and 'didn't keep food in the house.' Desert was something bought with gelatine. She innocently didn't know 'how' to cook for vegetarians but couldn't let me compromise my principles now, could she? removes cheeseboard, whisks away the potatoes. [Grinds teeth].

By the end of dinner I was so hungry, trapped in their freezing cold and horrible house, that if I hadn't been the world's nicest and politest child I would have started crying. Instead, I ate the salad and said thank you.

To be fair to him, my boyfriend did try to stand up for me. To his parents immense disapproval and thin-lipped rage, we went for an after dinner hike over the hills in the snow and tried to find a pub - any open pub, where I could get a packet of crisps.

We couldn't find one.

The visit lasted for another two days and I lost eight pounds.

@wigglerose

My colleagues inlaws part-cook the turkey on Christmas eve, let it "rest" overnight and finish it off the next day.

She's never eaten Christmas dinner with them and does not know how they haven't all died from food poisoning.

That's utterly rank but utterly pwns a kerfuffle on a forum I was on years ago where someone prepared the veg on Christmas Eve and left it in water overnight who doesn't

I had a colleague a few years ago who was surprised every guest went down with food poisoning from soup she'd left out on the side as refrigerating it apparently destroyed the taste.

Nothing like a bout of gut lurgy to prove that one.

@Elderflower14

When we have Yorkshire Puddings with Roast beef my mum does extra and we have them for pudding with golden Syrup.. 😋 😋 😋 😋 😋

My gran also did this. Yummy! She called it paupers pudding but it's nicer than most posh puddings IMO.

@Coffeemaniac

My BIL insists that it’s “the Birmingham way” to have roast dinner first meat and gravy, alone in a plate and then roasties and vegetables alone…His Mum served it this way🤣🤣

Blimey, I'm a Brummie but I've not come across that!

Some of these have had me in stitches, especially the iceberg lettuce ones!

Something that has stuck with me is being at a friend’s house, watching her mum feed the baby spaghetti hoops. They were so piping hot that her way of cooling them down was by putting each spoonful fully into her mouth first and then regurgitating it onto the spoon for the baby. I was only little myself and have I feeling I was very close up to the mum and very obviously transfixed by it all.

Also, ketchup - my lovely cousin who is a genuine foodie has not outgrown a real love of the stuff. I’ve heard her utter, as she douses her food in it, how she just needs something to cut through the richness. I also remember my husband saying ‘Urm, you’ve something in your hair’, to which she put the hair in her mouth and sucked it away before matter-of-factly noting, ‘ketchup.’