Tuesday, December 10, 2024 Hospitality Adventures

Having shared with you some of my Kitchen Disasters it’s time to move on to some of our experiences with hospitality. Many of these involve problems in the kitchen, but not all of them.

When we were still newlyweds, my husband and I decided to invite two other couples from church over for a New Year’s Eve celebration. One of the couples had a Trivial Pursuit game that we’d played at their house. I told the wife when issuing the invitation that it would be fun to play Trivial Pursuit that night and thought making that suggestion was a good way of letting her know they should bring their game (we didn’t have one). This is a language called “Minnesota Indirect.” Naturally, she had no idea that this indirect statement was a request for their game and when they came and she realized we didn’t have it, she made her husband go back home to get theirs. Cringe! That same evening, we had planned as entertainment to watch a movie that both my husband and I had loved as children but hadn’t seen since then: My Side of the Mountain. Oh my. The acting was terrible, the script was terrible, the cinematography was laughable. At one point eagles were shown to be flying in the sky and it looked like someone had cut out some photos of eagles and dangled them in front of the camera. We were SO embarrassed and apologized profusely, offering to turn the movie off, but these kind friends good-naturedly told us it was fine and finished it out with us. That might have been one of the first times we had anyone over that wasn’t family.

We moved to another state and started having people over from our church to our little rental house. We had just gotten our first gas grill and planned a casual meal of brats with a couple that we asked over after church. My husband put the brats on the grill and then came in and we had a lively conversation with this couple until a neighbor came to the door. “I just thought you should know that your grill is on fire in the back yard,” she said helpfully. Hubby ran out back and found the brats completely burned to a crisp, becoming almost lighter than air because their substance had been so thoroughly burnt out of them. Ha ha! I think we found some hot dogs in the freezer to cook up instead.

Another time I was making cooked carrots using a steamer and again, we were chatting away with guests in the living room. Suddenly, I noticed a definite “smoky” smell, ran out to the kitchen and discovered that the water in the pan had long since boiled away, and the pan was overheating and burning. Yikes! I had to throw the pan away when it cooled off.

The only other food mishap I can remember from that house was when we invited a couple over that was new to our church. I had made a chocolate pie using my Grandma Lois’s famous chocolate pudding recipe for the filling. Unbeknownst to me, it hadn’t set and when I brought it in for our dessert, it was a gloppy mess. I served it anyway with apologies, which probably tells you something about me.

When we bought our first home and moved in, we decided to start having neighbors over to get to know them. This generally worked out well, but we invited a young couple over one night and they couldn’t bring themselves to talk to us the entire night. We’d ask questions and they’d either nod, shake their heads or give one-word answers. They never initiated any conversation and were clearly very uncomfortable around us. It was a really long night and we could hardly wait for them to leave. We also invited a family over that we’d met somewhere else, maybe at church. The invitation was clearly for a meal and the time was at the normal supper hour. Nevertheless when they showed up, they’d already eaten. Try recovering from that kind of weird social scenario! We made the best of it that we could and they sat at the table watching us eat.

Eventually we moved to back to Minnesota and at some point started having people over, either from church or the neighborhood. A new couple moved in across the street from us after a few years, so we invited them over for a meal. I was baking a pie and right about the time our guests were coming up to the door, some of the pie innards had boiled over onto the oven floor and were burning, thus sending some smoke billowing into the kitchen and setting off the fire alarm. This made a wonderful first impression, I’m sure. They were pretty laid back about it, actually.

Another memorable occasion was when we had invited an older couple from church over for a meal. I was making ravioli and five minutes before they arrived, I was trying to strain the water out of the pan, the handles slipped and the whole kit and kaboodle got dumped on the floor, splashing boiling water on me and even a little on our daughter. We both ran upstairs to get cold water running on where the water had hit our skin and my husband scooped up the ravioli off the floor and put it in a colander. I came back down, rinsed it off and put the sauce on it. We had a nice time with our guests, but I felt rather guilty about serving food we’d had to pick up off our floor and I was conscious the entire night of the painful burns on my legs. We never did tell our friends.

One last story from that house. We invited a fairly new family from church over one Sunday after the church service. I had cleaned the house on the main floor, but the upstairs where all the bedrooms were looked like a tornado had gone through it. Hubby was showing the family around the house while I was finishing something in the kitchen when I overheard him saying, “Would you like to see the upstairs?” I was absolutely horrified, but couldn’t stop them. I cringed in embarrassment at what they must be thinking upon surveying our messy house. Later on, the wife told me that when they came into our house, she didn’t think she could be comfortable with us – we appeared to have a perfect family (ha!) and everything looked so orderly, unlike how she felt her own household was. Then she saw what our house looked like upstairs and realized that we were just a normal family like theirs and she was able to relax and enjoy the time with us. What a lesson that was for me!

I’ll probably delete this when I see the smoke from a burning blog post in the morning.