Weekend Food Failures

I invited 5 people round to dinner on Saturday. MS decided he'd do the honours and do the cooking. I got in makings of salad, and dessert. I told everyone 7.30. Two guests showed at 7.35. The cook called at 7.50 to ask which bus went from Angel to mine. When he arrived he had decided to make a root vegetable bake from his new tiny vegetarian cookbook (as we are his newest group of friends and we are all vegetarians he is dipping his toe into our world of eating). When he eventually arrived at 8.30 he had brought with him a tonne of root vegetables that needed to be cut into thin slices (think potato gratin), then layered into a cake tin dabbed with butter and baked for an hour and a half. The dinner went into the oven at 9.00pm (the chopping didn't take so long - all the guests were put to work - we had some discussion over how thin a slice a slice had to be but after a few stumbling blocks it seemed to be ok). When we took the long awaited dish out of the oven at 10.30 we had already eaten a mountain of salad with bread and drunk two bottles of wine. The instructions said turn out onto a plate. Having greased the tin it looked like the dish would come out ok apart from the fact that as I raised the tin up it all slipped out of form and would've been all over the floor had I not quickly slid the tin back down.

Now there was a fundamental flaw in this recipe. I mentioned potato gratin before - what holds the gratin together is the sauce that you pour over it to aid its cooking. This didn't have any sauce. Also you don't have to turn out a gratin - it is served from the dish. MS complained that he had been oppressed because we had not allowed him to follow the recipe to the letter and blamed us for it not being very nice. We all disagreed and concluded that it was due to it lacking the binding agent (we did allow him to differ in his opinion however).

When planning to feed people it is also a good idea not to turn over the main dish to someone who doesn't live in the same house as you and has a penchant for fashionable lateness. By the time the dish was ready we were a. too drunk to care and b. had lost our hunger and c. not too keen on the burnt top (our oven isn't very accurate with the temperature). Still the dessert was nice even though we didn't eat it until 11.45.