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.

[quote TomRipley]@MrsTerryPratchett
That does sound divine, I would have been happy with that!
However a far cry from these marge and shredded lettuce triangles[/quote]
Oh no @TomRipley that's not OK at all.

I'm having baked bean flashbacks

MIL had sliced bread with every meal, except if she had takeaway curry and then she had it as toast on the side.
She didn’t really approve of liquids with meals, so I was considered very strange for drinking water.

@Dilbertian

My parents and my ILs are perplexed by the amount of water we all drink with our meals. At my parents' we eat in the kitchen, but at my ILs' we eat in the dining room, so it's a trek to keep refilling glasses, especially as FIL doesn't like the highballs used at the table. MIL eventually bought a jug specifically for our use at mealtimes. A 1 litre jug between 5 people We generally refill it it at least twice.

See I think you're the weird one there, we don't routinely have water with our meal, if someone wants it they ask if anyone else does but it's rare for anyone to drink more than half a glass.

@cantgetmyheadroundit

What's weird about sliced white bread with soup?

Thought the same. I consider that totally normal :-/ Any bread with soup is acceptable to me.

As a child of the 50s and 60s, we always had bread with our dinner, we also had bread and butter with tinned fruit or jelly. We also had Yorkshire pudding with jam on as a pudding.

@Nandocushion 😂, pizza, curry, (no rice!!), chilli, sausage rolls, garlic bread, oven chips.

I can eat oven chips but there isn’t enough to go around in the first place so don’t really get any!

I eat cold rice pudding, cold corned beef and bread with soup, and a cup of tea with dinner, I must be very weird. Or just very common
The strangest thing I ever saw was a friend's mother pouring tomato soup (Heinz) over sausage and chips instead of gravy.

@TheGrumpyGoat

My grandma used to make me ‘ham sandwiches’. Except it wasn’t like any ham I’d encountered before, and it came out of a tin. It was only when I was a bit older that I realised it was tongue 🤢.

My God, that takes me back. I used to love the stuff, with Branston pickle in a sandwich. Or was It a butty?

I remember going on a church picnic with my parents and siblings and other congregation members. There was a bloke there, single, middle aged, no kids. He made a Russian salad, but what absolutely flabbergasted me still to this day is he put the entire thing in a bowl of lime jelly and froze it. When dishing up, he proudly calmed it "solid salad" that was over 30 years ago and I still remember it to this day. Most bizarre thing ever.

Called*

There is nothing better than soft white bread with lashings of butter with your soup. We used to make "duckies" out of white bread to float in our soup as kids... you'd eat them when they were deliciously sodden. I'm not sure I could get away with that as an adult!

She didn’t really approve of liquids with meals, so I was considered very strange for drinking water.

My late mil was the same,thought it spoiled the appetite

We have some extended family who will do a buffet for example but there’s barely enough food for everyone…so you feel rude to take a normal sized portion. My family are probably just greedy but I always view that sort of thing as a bit mean….thankfully most of our friends are like us and think it’s better to have too much than not enough when you have guests!

Our worst one was "spaghetti bolognaise" - mince browned in a frying pan with a tin of heinz spaghetti stirred through and heated for a few minutes. The baked beans in a cottage pie only sounds marginally better.

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.

This last weekend, DH, DD and I were invited to very good friends house to stay for 2 nights. I know they dont really cook so offered to bring food and cook for us all one night as a thank you. Cue no, no. We will just eat out. We arrive and I am told, we thought we would all cook a roast meal the second night, the husband had bought a mingingly expensive joint and it was sitting in the fridge. These friends know they cant cook, so clearly were hoping I would step up to the cooker. I was happy to, but would have preferred to have my choice of meal to cook so I could plan something that wouldnt tie me to the kitchen for several hours. It also became apparent that their kitchen was equipped about as well as a really bad student flat. One tiny scratched frying pan and 4 assorted useless floppy plastic spatulas. Again if I had known I was cooking, I could have packed a whisk, a mixing bowl, some butter than hadnt expired 6 month previously (I know it wasnt bad per se, but it did taste weird) etc etc

I did get a roast dinner on the table for all of us (and the extra couple they invited) but it was a true labour of love and it is a testament to what wonderful people they are in every facet of their lives (except for understanding about cooking) that I continue to still love them. 🤣

Cracking an egg on a pizza before it goes in the oven.

Also have a friend who puts spaghetti Bolognese or left over lasagne in a toaster bag type toastie.

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

It is as horrendous as it sounds

I’d be happy with white sliced with soup at my in-laws. However we get it cut into 1” squares, which just seems like a lot of extra work for them, and results in rubbish soggy croutons instead of nice dunky bread.

The oddest thing though is that they serve up a roast dinner with potatoes and gravy already on the plate. You get to add everything else, including the meat ON TOP of the gravy. Never figured out what that was all about.

My gran used to buy tinned pink salmon, put red food colouring into it and pretend it was the more expensive red salmon

When I was maybe 11 or 12 I was invited for lunch at a friend's house. Her mum asked me if I liked toasted cheese sandwiches and assuming this was what my family called a "cheese toastie" and made in a toastie machine, I said I did. What I actually got was two slices of bread, toasted in the toaster until they were thoroughly burnt to charcoal, then buttered and sandwiched together with a slice of plastic cheese. The whole family ate them like these and apparently didn't have a problem with it. I forced down as much as I could out of politeness but it was one of the most vile things I have ever eaten.

Next time I was invited, I was again offered a toasted cheese sandwich. I asked if I could have it untoasted please, and happily munched my cheese sandwich while the rest of the family ate their blackened toast.

I still can't get my head around it.

@MacMahon

Cracking an egg on a pizza before it goes in the oven.

Pizza Bismarck. Completely Italian.

@Flufferty

My gran used to buy tinned pink salmon, put red food colouring into it and pretend it was the more expensive red salmon

Oh bless her.