Let's get real: none of us are perfect hosts. Except maybe my colleague Anna, who'smastered the artof hostessing. For the most part, though, cooking for guests offers a lot of opportunities for dirty kitchen secrets, culinary screw-ups, overlooked hygiene, and embarrassing, irreversible mistakes.
For starters, a busy kitchen oftentimes means dropping things. One of my colleagues at Epi admits to serving "floor food. Because I sweep and I mean the cooking should removeany of the bad stuff, right? Riiiight?" Another Epi staffer says "I've definitely picked up a couple pieces ofeggplantthat had fallen from my cutting board onto the floor and thrown them in my frying pan."
You'd be surprised (or maybe not) to hear that the same grimy tactics are being utilized at restaurants and cafes all the time. "At a cafe I worked at," one coworker tells me, "I watched a manager take day-oldbanana breadout of the trash (which I had just tossed because it was old) and sell it to a customer." Well, was the banana breadabove the rimof the can?
If you have pets, you probably know that things can get dicey around food prep. "I caught my dog licking theThanksgiving turkeyand I didn't say anything," one of my friends recently confessed to me. That isn't the only canine horror story we heard—another colleague of mine had a very recent slip-up. "My friend brought her dog to my dinner party on Friday and the dog licked the vanilla ice cream I was serving and we just sort of scooped out the part that his tongue had come in contact with and kept serving."
Then, there's the careless, haphazard uh-ohs. I, for one, accidentally slathered Crisco on at least a dozentoasted bagelsbefore hosting a brunch—in my defense, thatpackagelooks a lot likecream cheese. I covered it up withsmoked salmon and all the fixingsand kept my mouth shut.
One Twitter user says she was cooking dinner and "forgot to take the plastic wrap off thegreen chile chicken enchiladascasserole before I put it in the oven." And yep, she (unknowingly) served it with the melted plastic anyway. "I didn't notice until putting leftovers away and saw bits of plastic around the edges of the pan and stuck to cheese on enchiladas."
How about full-on ignoring your guests' dietary restrictions? A Twitter user admits to some "not dirty, just...unethical?" behavior in the kitchen. "My friend was going through a "vegan" phase and I served her mushroom soup made with chicken stock." A colleague at Epi admits, "I was once cooking dinner for some really fussy friends who only eatorganic, pasture-raisedmeats. So I spent $30 on a fancy chicken, and when got home and opened it up, it had gone bad. I ran to the grocery store, bought a Perdue chicken androasted thatinstead." Another colleague shares, "At a restaurant I worked in, the chef was doing a dinner for a group of vegans. I watched as he puthoneyin one dish and I didn’t say anything."
Thankfully, none of these dirty deeds resulted in anyone becoming physically ill, but these tales still haunt us. Makes you think twice about heading to that dinner party, huh? Maybe you should stick to hosting.
If you drop these dishes on the floor and scoop them up, your secret is safe with us.
