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.

Crushed up crisps on a pasta bake.

This actually works really well! Before you bake it, crush the crisps and sprinkle on top, then add grated cheese. Gives a nice crunchy topping.Crisps are just potatoes, oil and salt after all.

I'm our house, we ate loads of ready meals or pasta with sauce out of a jar.
When I had my first proper boyfriend at 15, all the meals were cooked from scratch and my mind was absolutely blown. I had no idea food could taste so good.

They'd also open jars of chutney, marmite, marmalade, sauce etc. and then keep them in the cupboard rather than the fridge.

Nobody keeps marmite in the fridge, surely? Madness! That's like putting your salt in the fridge, completely unnecessary.

@Chicchicchicchiclana really common practice in lots of catering places. My brother used to work in a restaurant that did this. We told him not to for Christmas....

You don't need to put preserved things like marmalade and marmite in the fridge who is doing that?

@RosesAndHellebores

Soup is one of the few dishes that requires a side plate for the bread, of whatever description. How else do you spoon the soup, hopefully in a little swirl, onto the plate to mop with bread, preferably good bread.

One should never dunk.

Why do people make up pointless rules like this???

How is pouring soup onto a plate to then essentially dunk your bread into the shallower transferred soup any different to cutting out the middle man and putting the same piece of bread into slightly deeper soup?

People have too much time on their hands. Just eat your soup (it makes no difference if you scoop towards or away). Don't dribble your food everywhere. Keep your mouth closed when chewing .. easy.

@Mrsjayy

You don't need to put preserved things like marmalade and marmite in the fridge who is doing that?

I put jam in the fridge in the summer, otherwise it seems to ferment or something.

@fuckoffImcounting

I see your Hot Meaty Milk and raise you Boiled Lamb Hearts. The heart meat was grey and of a paste consistency and we used to lick the grey meaty mess from the rubbery heart tubes.

My mum used to make lamb’s heart casserole. She stuffed the hearts with sage and onion stuffing, then casseroled them, and we got one each. They were very tasty, and educational at the same time!

This thread reminded me: a friend of mine whose parents were farmers, now retired, recently went back to visit his mum. His mum still keeps around 100 rabbits.

He tucked into his bean casserole and commented they had a strange flavour and texture and his mum replied: "they're not beans they're rabbits' kidneys".

@Figgit

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

When you have pie and mash (and liquor) in East and South London, it's de rigeur to douse your mash and pie with vinegar and pepper.

Nom Nom

I put jam in the fridge in the summer, otherwise it seems to ferment or something.

Mine is always alright .

I can understand why you would tip the soup bowl, and why you would spoon, away from yourself, as I had an elderly relative with a shaky hand. Tipping the bowl or spooning towards herself would have ended up with her covered in soup!

No point whatsoever to "not dunking" the bread. Of course you dunk the bread in the soup. And save a last piece to clean the bowl with.

I just remembered one - going to a boyfriend's grandparents' for lunch. The grandma was a fabulous lady but when she cooked mince, it was literally JUST mince, very finely ground, fried on its own. Very strange. She made a lovely "cream shape" though - which looked like jelly mixed with cream before it set (this may well have been what it was) - nice sort of fruity mousse thing.

I keep opened jam in the fridge. And most other condiments. Don’t have marmite so no idea about that.

I have one weird habit that makes DH raise an eyebrow...

Years ago I was in some arty cafe with a friend and we'd chosen parsnip soup for lunch. Miles away in our conversation I managed to sprinkle brown sugar on to my soup rather than the packet of pepper I'd supposed to have grabbed. I styled it out. It. Was. Delicious.

Parsnip soup with a sprinkling of brown sugar is now very much a thing here. Sorry 😳

[quote SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius]@Drinkingallthewine - please will you share your spicy chicken and rice recipe? I promise not to leave bits out or substitute the chicken with beef![/quote]
This serves about 4. It's my quick go-to for lazy evenings

1 green chilli chopped
1 level teaspoon turmeric
1 level teaspoon chilli powder
1 level teaspoon cumin seeds
1 level teaspoon salt (I use slightly less than that )
1 large onion sliced
4 chicken breasts, chopped
Other veg optional - mushrooms, babycorn, mangetout etc.

Fry up the onion and spices with a bit of butter or oil. Add in the tomatoes and chicken and simmer until chicken is cooked. Turn down the heat & add in 3/4 of a tin of coconut milk. While that's gently warming, boil your rice.

It was on some cooking show way back in the mists of time - the cook did it with fish pieces, so if you wanted to do that, just reduce the cooking time of the fish accordingly.

Vegetarian, DH isn't. His parents invited us for dinner and it was 100% meat, even veg was cooked in meat juices. They thoughtfully considered me tho. My dinner was in bowl in fridge: thought it was unusually thoughtful of MIL as normally she's a bit of a cow with me. It was prepacked salad leaves. Nothing else.

@DroopyClematis

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.

I’ll only eat porridge made with water and salt and served with milk. Anything else isn’t porridge.

Birchers Museli is an exception though because it’s not porridge - its museli made with oats c

Went to a friends house as a child and their parents insisted that toast and fried bread were eaten with a knife and fork!!
Also I found it weird that they decanted their individual portions of fish and chips from the Chippy on to plates and ate them with cutlery instead of just eating them from the paper with their hands like I did at home! (I mean putting a Chippy tea on plates didn’t seem weird to me if sharing portions, but they literally had a portion each already in polystyrene Chippy trays and had the wooden forks!)

Thank you, @Drinkingallthewine - that sounds delicious!

@Nosquit

Went to a friends house as a child and their parents insisted that toast and fried bread were eaten with a knife and fork!! Also I found it weird that they decanted their individual portions of fish and chips from the Chippy on to plates and ate them with cutlery instead of just eating them from the paper with their hands like I did at home! (I mean putting a Chippy tea on plates didn’t seem weird to me if sharing portions, but they literally had a portion each already in polystyrene Chippy trays and had the wooden forks!)

My Mum used to do that, onto plates she had warmed ready for them. I imagine it was more the 'proper' thing for her generation.

dish my mum made in the early 1990s, which I have never forgotten although I think she only made it once: beetroot jelly

It was amongst the recipes in a book by the Cooking Canon and a Rabbi called Lionel Blue!

BIL always puts his takeaway pizza carefully on to a plate and eats with a knife and fork.

@NormallyFairlyLevelHeaded

There must be someone you can report him to? Sounds like a psychopath to me.

Some of these are just eating disorders imposed on people by the person cooking the dinner, or passive-aggressiveness dished up on a plate!

Some though are wacky combinations likely borne out of necessity to help stretch a meal further and maybe have become a childhood memory. - Ours at home was a vegetable, lentil and barley broth. We would come in from school frozen to basically a vat of it on the range, with a pot of boiled fluffy potatoes beside it. Homemade soda bread with home-made butter on the table to go with it. A dash of milk to cool it down for the toddlers. It turns out that that was her go-to meal when the money ran out at the tail end of the month, but as children, we didn't know that.

It warmed you right down to your toes, and I still make it now when the winter months hit - there's something so comforting about eating something that filled and warmed you as a kid, isn't there?

@NormallyFairlyLevelHeaded

BIL always puts his takeaway pizza carefully on to a plate and eats with a knife and fork.

This will get you ejected from some pizza places in NYC.