Mom, are the sweet potatoes supposed to be on fire?

Well at least you're consistent.

Have you tried merrangues again?

Sadly, no.

Dont be sad marty. I dont want that.

Live, laugh, learn.

This is a great title, Marty..


..remembering the time at Dys and Diane's where I set the flame under an empty glass dish, instead of the front burner.
"Why are you cooking that dish?"

When my daughter was a newborn, I boiled the nipples for her bottles and steamed the bottles. I told my husband to go ahead with a guys night out, that I'd be fine at home with the baby. I started boiling the nipples and forgot about them. When I smelled smoke I went in to find all the water boiled out with a melted mound of rubber. I cried hysterically for about 20 minutes at least.

This could be a book...

I remember the bad, bad, night when I tried to cook the gourmet duck...with green peppercorns.


I was renting, and, well, basically I discovered that night that the oven didn't work.


But that wasn't all.


Because I had spent so much on the food, I especially requested that the guests brought nice wine.


Most happily obliged.


My dear ex-housemate friend, Sally brought along her rich lawyer friend, Simon.



Between them, Sally and Simon (mainly Simon) probably earned more than the rest of us combined.


They brought ONE bottle of Starwine. Now, Starwine is to wine as sweetened and milk substituted coffee powder is to coffee. Sally had been raised as a mean beetch by her horrid mama, but SIMON??????? I knew he knew better. I knew Sally well enough to point out the sin, and send them both off to contribute properly (which they, well chagrined, did.)



The first appetizers and entree were great. Then we waited for the duck.


During the wait, Simon and Petra (a friend who had been a colleague Probation Officer) discovered they had something in common.


Petra had recently had a client disclose sexual abuse of her little girl and herself so gross and disgusting that I will not go there. Suffice to say that the sweeter bits involved animals and guns.....and that the offender had taken many, many, many photos, which her client gave to Petra.


Simon, as it turned out, was defending the offender (though the mother was clearly also mad as a cut snake and chargeable for not protecting her daughter).


Simon was going with a not guilty plea, which meant mad mummy and wee girl-child were going to have to go through an appalling experience in the stand.....DESPITE THE PHOTOS.


This led to an.....er......very fervid discussion of the role of the defence lawyer when he knew he was lying, and the moral, and professional ethics of this, and ranged through many and varied aspects of the judicial system and its faults and benefits..........as the duck got later, the wine was consumed more and the passions rose.



I was so transfixed and involved that I did not realise it had gone midnight, and my guests were irate and starving, while the duck was warm, yet raw.


Eventually, I was reminded, and cooked the duck on a hotplate.



The dinner was to become known as "Fight Night" or "Ducking for Godot".

Well, THAT'S a classic....

oy nothing beats starving and feuding guests (bm)

I have worse.....MUCH worse.....

and you tell it so well...
not to flatter, but really.

Indeed!

BBB
After getting married (the first time) when I was very young, I invited family members to my first dinner party. I planned to serve a large corned beef. I put the roast in the oven four hours before dinner time. I kept looking in the oven to see if it was done. Finally, in a panic, I called my mother tearfully explaining that after roasting the corned beef for four hours it still wasn't done. She asked why and I replied, it's still red.

The corned beef tasted good if a tad over-done.

BBB

Here's one of my REAL hospitality nightmares....only I think I have told it before.


I was sharing a house with its owner, and wanted to host a party for a friend who was bringing her new baby back from overseas for us to see, since my place was most suitable for the numbers.


Jenny, the owner, quite reasonably preferred (it being summer and all, and not her friends) not to have all the mess of a party inside, so asked that people be kept outside, or in the kitchen only.


A group of friends insisted on helping with the party.


I was a bit wary of this, having been burned before, but they insisted.


We divvied up the guest list. A number of key folk were to be asked to bring some party food with them, and the organisers and myself would provide the bulk of it. The organisers were to bring some extra chairs and arrive early on the day to help set up.


The essential instructions to invitees were to be:


The party is OUTSIDE. The owner of the premises does NOT want it to be inside.


Bring a chair (common for outdoor parties)


BRING SOMETHING WARM TO PUT ON IN CASE IT GETS COLD........this was to be stressed.




The day dawned.


K, the friend with the baby, DID come over to help, but baby was unsettled and grizzly all afternoon, so she was unable to do so.


L, the one who had insisted there be a party and that it be jointly organised, rang to say she was in desperately pre-menstrual, and in too foul a mood to come and help. Now, L's tendency to become an evil, sulphurous Beelzebub whan pre-menstrual was very well-known to me and K, so I understood.


Next of the organising committee to call was B. B was well known for her flightiness and the tendency to be led astray by her gonads. Sure enough, she was in a new adored somebody's bed and "will be a bit late". I knew this could mean anything from 7 hours late to not turning up at all.


As can be imagined, I was in a slight state by the time the guests began turning up, especially as a lot of them were not well known to me, being K's friends.


It soon became evident that those who were to be asked to bring some food were NOT, in fact, bringing any. On close examination, K confessed that she and L had decided to shorten the food-bringers list, as they felt we would end up with too much. Unfortunately, some misunderstanding had resulted in NOBODY being asked to bring food.



The same unfortunate thing had occurred re the chairs and the warm clothing.


They had decided that there would be too many chairs and that it was so hot that nobody would need any wraps.


A couple of desperate phone calls, and sending the kids to the neighbours' to beg chairs, resulted in more or less enough chairs......but the food situation was disastrous. The hordes of guests were almost through what I had prepared........K had been able to do nothing...L was still absent, as was B.



Muttering imprecations, I took off to the shops and bought heaps of party snack stuff to keep them busy, as well as stuff to cook for later on when they all became ravenous.



Sweating, furious and confined to the kitchen, I was unable to manage drinks etc, which Jenny heroically took on.



B arrived!!!!! With some extra rations, and with an extra pair of hands to chop and mix etc. I wept on her shoulder with relief.


We could hear the party humming along outside, and were able to keep them assuaged with munchies.


L arrived......without the expected reinforcements of food but with an attitude. She confirmed that she, also, had not passed on my instructions re food, chairs, and warm clothing. It was getting cold.



Actually, it was apparently getting very cold. Like I was gonna know working as hard as I was!



Thinly clad guests were coming in to huddle in the kitchen. I was passing out coats and scarves etc. Finally, a very imperious guest marched in and demanded that the party move inside, nobody had been warned it was to be an outside party, they were freezing and without wraps!!!


Jenny surrendered, and people moved in. Most of them, as is common, never moved past the kitchen. I was attempting, with B's valiant help, to get sweet stuff out to them, almost unable to move through the packed masses.


Having finally fed them every morsel I could manage to scrape together, B and I went outside to rest for a moment, and for me to express my annoyance and frustration.


No sooner out there than K arrived...."They need coffee."



I set up cups etc on the dining table, which was part of the kitchen/dining area, and hence packed to the gunwales with people.


I then set up my dripolator, and, when it was ready, held the boiling hot coffee high as I attempted to squirm through the masses.



Now...here is a little bit of back story: Unbeknownst to me, Jenny had taken to re-heating coffee for herself on her gas stove, in the dripolator's pot. Jenny, a delightful woman, has a fatal flaw. She burns stuff. In this case, she had on several occasions (as she bravely confessed later) set the plastic handle of my coffee pot on fire...at the bit where it was attached to the pot. I could not see the results of this, as the handle was black.



You guessed it......the handle failed as I was in the thickest part of the throng.


Boiling hot coffee went everywhere.



We sat the burned (mainly feet) around a huge tub that had icily contained the drinks, and nobody ended up badly burned because of the immediate first aid.


L tossed off her mood, and went into nurse mode.


Once I was sure everyone was ok, I took off down to the uttermost depths of the very big back yard with B and tried to get drunk. I was successful.


Oddly enough, I didn't break anything when I did all the cleaning up when all the buggers had finally gone, by about 7 am.

I actually gasped...!



What heroics, though!

The only fukking heroism was not stabbing my dear friends repeatedly with the carving knife.

Those are really classic stories, Deb! This could be a really fun thread

As I said...!