I have this habit of feeding people.

[reynardo]

People who come to our house tend to leave with full stomachs. I've described it as an overdeveloped hospitality gland, but it's also the Mum in me coming out.

Someone once called me the softest touch he's ever known.

The regular shinyshinyelves players always get a full meal, ranging from curries-and-rice to roast-pig-and-multiple-veg. People staying over occasionally get subjected to the full Sunday Breakfast routine, which involved pancakes, REAL A grade dark maple syrup (imported very specially by jazzmasterson and harliquinn), bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs, fresh fruit salad at the side, real coffee, juice, and whatever else I can think of. And people walking through the front door are likely to be assaulted with the questions "How are you? Have you eaten?"

The only people who got away recently without being fully fed were usekh (came down with food poisoning while visiting someone else, and had to be just nursed for a couple of days instead) and the lovely seedy_girl and thorfinn, who were off to Yum Cha and needed the stomachs empty. You have no idea how hard it was to let them go in that state.

And sometimes the poor people I live with and the extended family and the visitors have to put up with the ultimate, the terrible the Mum's Guilt Meal. This has three stages:


1) The Guilt Trip.

"Oh My Goodness you poor people - working so hard and me never home and I must cook a proper home cooked meal for you because you're obviously all starving!"

Cue some enormous hunk of meat, a pile of vegetables big enough to feed a family of four for a week, gravy, and all the trimmings. Cooked, crackled, gravied, stirred.


2) The Serving.

Large plates. Larger servings. More on top. "Is that enough? You can always have seconds. Here - this is a nice bit."

But the family know the trick.


3) The end result

You see, they know they don't have to eat it all. It's to make me feel better, not them. So I don't have a problem with people eating only a fraction. At least I know I offered the food.

And besides, I can make Thai curries with the leftovers.

Comments

[sarin-girl.livejournal.com]

Heh.. I eat maybe 2 home cooked meals a week, and when it's a game weekend, one of them is yours.. : )

Once I get back/after you move (whichever is best) you have to let me make you dinner..

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

Right, so if I'm ever in your house I'll be glad of the warning, as I have a deeply-ingrained case of Clean Plate Guilt, the fear that if every edible morsel proffered to me is not consumed, I will have insulted the host / the cook / the other people at the table / God / the starving children in $DEVELOPING_COUNTRY and will bring shame upon my self and everyone who knows me.

Absurd, yes, but it makes eating in restaurants difficult since the portions are so huge (at least in the US).

:)

[taleya.livejournal.com]

You sound like my grandma :) (and in a good way...she raised 7 kids and fifty grandkids with fantastic cooking)

Remind me to be careful should we meet though :P Nothing against you, I just tend to be odd in my eating habits and don't eat much :)

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

Depending which drugs the GP has me on I'll eat it. All. And ask for more. Then eat what's left for breakfast. Then eat what you cooked for breakfast.

According to my family, I'm not an especially big eater. According to everyone else, I'm a pig. My metabolism requires that I eat at least twice as much as anyone else my size, and some of the drugs my GP has prescribed over the years haven't helped. Some have, most noticeably the Losec (for the first time in my life I was eating normal-sized portions), but the Nexium we recently replaced that with has had the opposite effect.

Can I come to your house one night for dinner?

[wookie-cd.livejournal.com]

In my position it's more or less impossible to think of that as a bad thing.

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

*makes notes for future visit to Australia...* If hungry, find excuse to visit Reynardo.

[waitingman.livejournal.com]

I think we have a mutual dinner appreciation thing going on here... Yours are definitely more filling though... No complaints here!!!

[quatranoctal.livejournal.com]

A home visit is sounding like a nice idea now ;)

In return, I probably won't do dinner, but with enough warning I love to bake cakes and biscuits. Time it right and I may even manage my well-loved lemon tea cake made with home-grown lemons. Although the next one has been promised to someone already ...