Dinner parties gone bad

[tryska]

ok.

toasted first off i have to give you my condolences. i don't know what i'm going to do when mine eventually pass.

still the idea of a dead cat dressed in a feather boa and glitter being passed around by a bunch of kids at a party strikes me as hilarious.

[bleudauvergne]

ok.

toasted first off i have to give you my condolences. i don't know what i'm going to do when mine eventually pass.

still the idea of a dead cat dressed in a feather boa and glitter being passed around by a bunch of kids at a party strikes me as hilarious.

I think it would be a fine way to go.

[tryska]

i know when i pass i wouldn't mind being buried wearing glitter and a feather boa.

[jschyun]

yeah, that's not a bad way to go. 17! How many human years is that? I hope my dogs live that long.

The worst party was one where I helped the host to set up. The host was my best friend, a programmer. The guests were mostly programmers from work. The food was great, some Chinese snacks made by wife, stuff trucked in from Andronicos and other places around his house, tons of beer,soda, and wine in fridge, on ice, etc.

The guests came, sat down and proceeded to say almost nothing for several hours. They picked at the food. They drank water, maybe some soda. The clock ticked until bedtime, and they slowly trickled out. One programmer, hot for one of the girls who was invited, tried to impress her by playing Nintendo really well. Those two stayed until 2am, until I yelled at them to get out, because they were sitting on the couch (my bed, as I was staying over at their house for the weeknd)

[Mabelline]

Yeah, howdy, we've had some good get-togethers, but I guess the most memorable F*Up was my pops on Christmas 1979. We had our whole family, and 12 Navaho friends of my dad's who were codetalkers, right? So we had all this special stuff made up, chilling in both the fridges,, and what's my pops decide to do? F*** with the electric!!! One of his running buds told him we could pay less for electric with a different sized fuse!!!Ack, gack,,40 folks standing around with no frigging electric!

[Shannon_Elise]

Clothier-

Your Thanksgiving dinner reminds me of our recent Easter dinner. My grandmother had decided that we should have the meal at her house. She is not the best cook in the world (unlike others, I have not learned a damn thing food related from my grandma except how not to do things). She has prefaced this by saying she wanted to cook everything and my mother could bring the deviled eggs and she "allowed" me to make dessert. After grilling her, she said that she was "making" those brown and serve rolls so I insisted on baking some bread.

When we got to her house (at the preset time) she was running around like a chicken with her head cut off. The meal consisted of the Honey Baked Ham store's Roasted Turkey Breast, which she managed to render into plastic by putting the damn thing in the oven and forgetting about it. On the side was canned cranberry sauce (this is Easter right?) that was still in it's cylindrical shape. Also served was "homemade" stuffing, which was StoveTop (I saw the box in the trash). The gravy that she insisted everyone put on the stuffing was a combination of two jars of Heinz gravy (regular and fat free). She then stood over everyone as they ate, insisting that they were not eating enough and asking what she had done wrong (I remained silent). Oh, I almost forgot, my father is not a fan of turkey so she made him ham. She opened a can of processed ham (glorified Spam) and burned it in the toaster oven. Needless to say I had a half a slice of turkey and a hard boiled egg from an earlier Easter Egg hunt for dinner. Dessert turned out great though, a cinnamon cheesecake with Ceylon, China Cassia, and Vietnamese Cassia cinnamon. Bread was a greek easter bread with Mahlab.

As for my own dinner party disasters, once I was serving Thomas Kellers "Pot au Feu" from The French Laundry Cookbook to the same family my sister and brother in law (both 27) refused to eat the weird white vegetables on their plate (turnips!). They wouldn't even try them. Meanwhile, their son, my seven year old nephew tried every bit on his plate. Even my 1 1/2 year old neice was stealing away the bread that had been spread with roasted bone marrow. Yet my sister and brother in law's plates remained rather full. It was infuriating to go through all that work and realize that they would have eaten more at McDonald's. I had to tell them that the creme fraiche sauce that was served with dessert was kind of like "heavy cream and sour cream" otherwise they wouldn't have eaten it (they don't like french food??).

Okay, so my situation is not all that bad, but it feels good to rant to those that understand the situation!

Shannon

[Mabelline]

AH...bone marrow..Injun Butter. One of the 5 basic food groups!!!

Edit to add sis and sideidiot need to be slapped. White veggies are excellent-especially roasted turnips. Some folks just don't have no raisin'.

I was raised to try a bite of everything on my plate. What happened to that? My kids were brought up the same...they'll eat anything but a Volkswagon. And they are excellent cooks.

Edited April 19, 2004 by Mabelline (log)

[Susan G]

I was 19, throwing my first "adult" party, a brunch. The guests are mostly friends of my older SO. Eggs Benedict and mini muffins and coffee. Oh, this is painful!

I get up early to mix the batter for the muffins: Forget to turn on the oven. There's no coffee filters. I run out to get some.............putting my schedule completely upside-down. Guests are arriving by the time I return.

I've got the mufffins and Canadian bacon ready.........now time to make the hollandaise. It curdles. Then separates. Then curdles. I've burned the muffins..........more than just a little. They're inedible. I am so stressed out I can't talk to guests. Really. I. Can't. Talk. To. Guests.

Curdles. Separates. Curdles. I'm obviously overcorrecting the sauce each time, and my technique is just wrong (directly over a burner), but I don't know that, and I can't let it go.

By the time I say the hell with it, and scramble the eggs and toast the muffins, everyone is so hungry and sad (watching me stress), they quickly leave after eating my bad food. I'm left with dishes and a mountain of shame and remorse.

Even the death of my beloved cat couldn't have made me feel worse. (But maybe if I'd *chucked* her body into a field............)

To this day, (nearly 20 yars later), I haven't attempted hollandaise again. I even look away quickly when I see the instant mixes in the store.

How pathetic is that??

[RebeccaT]

Why not post a disaster as your very first post? Hi everyone, I'm Rebecca, and here's my biggest cooking disaster story...

It was my first cocktail party, at Christmas-time. I was expecting about 30 people. I had been cooking for a week, storing food in my fridge and freezer, and all was going like clockwork. Until around 2PM on the day of the party. Did I mention that it was Friday the 13th?

All is going fine until I decide that my super duper disposal can handle radish leaves. Wrong. I clogged my drain. Completely. My father-in-law had to come over and dismantle my sink, a process which took about 2 hours including the time it took to get to my house.

Meanwhile, I slice and bake the lime meltaways. Recipe says to let cool for 8 minutes, then toss with powdered sugar. These are fragile cookies, so I figure I should use a sifter and sift the sugar over them instead. Which goes very smoothly. Until I taste a broken one, and discover that I hav just sifted the entire batch of cookies with cake flour. I was able to rescue most of them by tapping the flour off, putting them back in the oven to warm up, and doing the sugar instead. Crisis averted, now onto the next disaster.

I knocked over the vase with my centerpiece in it not once, but twice. I had taken it off the table and put it somewhere where the kitties couldn't get to it and knock it over. I should have put it somewhere that I couldn't get to it.

And lest you think that bad things happen in 3's, no, in my world they happen in 4's. About 2 hours before guests start arriving, I am setting out bottles of wine, and I proceed to drop a bottle and spill it all over the counter, floors, and pale yellow walls.

I ended up just sitting crosslegged in the middle of my floor for about 30 minutes, afraid to touch anything lest in spontaneously combust. I finally got up the nerve to take a shower (less chance of drowning than in the bathtub) and was able to get the final setup done with the help of some friends who came over early. The party was a huge success, but I will never have a party on Friday the 13th again!

[Mabelline]

You are a trooper, Rebeeca, and muy welcome!! You have poise I lack.

[NeroW]

One time we had a dinner party for 20 or 25 people and it was a "Risk!" party, so everyone sat around and had a good time playing Risk while my sister and I busted our asses off for the 2nd day in a row to serve all this food from many different countries.

Anyway, all the knife/hot oil/hard work was done, so I got stoned, and then I put the super-delicious triple-cheese macaroni in the oven to bake (this was the American dish). Well, I forgot to take the Saran Wrap off the top. It baked right into the macaroni, and you couldn't tell it was there, and God help us, we served it anyway.

I've done a lot of dumb shit here and there. I always manage to start kitchen towels on fire in front of other people--which is not a head-turner in a professional kitchen, but when you do it in someone's house, they have a cow about it.