The most useful piece of catering advice I have been given over the years is "Never Apologise". The idea is that if you don’t draw people’s attention to your ‘mistakes’ they will probably never notice.
The second most useful piece of catering advice, that I worked out for myself, is don’t swig too many glasses of white wine to steady your nerves before serving dinner to guests you really want to impress…
We had invited some of the other parents from school for dinner - the ones we have heard swearing at the school gate, whose children are often late and have forgotten their homework, who arrive in odd shoes (the children) or in pajamas (the parents), the ones we thought we would like because they seem just like us… Mrs Fussy Knickers was obviously not on the guest list.
Have I mentioned that our kitchen is the Smallest Kitchen in the World? Everyone arrived, and expressed the appropriate surprise that I owned a pair of high heels and that my Ugg boots are not permanently welded to my feet, and then proceeded to mill around my kitchen aimlessly. Under normal circumstances this would have been fine, however, I had not thought through the logistical nightmare of operating in a kitchen the size of a matchbox packed with sixteen ‘polite-and-middle-class-but-determined-to-get-sloshed-because-we’ve-paid-for-a-babysitter’ primary school parents. In an effort to look vaguely yummy mummy - that is slim AND gorgeous AND good at cooking, all at the same time - I had put on my favourite green leather peep-toes. I only ever wear heels at weddings and parties, and sadly there aren’t enough of either in a year to afford me much practice at actually walking in them without undue wobble. Throw in a couple of glasses of chilled vino blanco and you get the picture.
I was trying to throw together a salad of baby spinach, figs and feta in a suitably informal but inspired kind of way, when it all started to go haywire.
"Hope you like spinach!" I joked to a woman who had been watching my attempt at Nigella-like insouciance.
"Actually, I prefer it cooked," she replied. I pretended not to hear. "Are you going to make a dressing?" she asked.
I realised that I was not going to get to the fridge unobserved for the bottle of time-saving shop-bought vinaigrette. And that I had lobbed the last lemon half in the bin that afternoon because it was hard as a rock and someone was bound to inspect my fruit bowl. And everyone was watching, so I couldn’t fish it out and rinse it off. I reached for the Balsamic, only to find too late that the inner plastic cap that regulates the flow had miraculously disappeared and a huge torrent of vinegar poured into the bowl, immediately turning the sheep’s cheese an unappetising shade of sludge-brown. Trying to look as if everything was going swimmingly well, I picked up the extra-virgin olive oil and up-ended it over the salad. Nothing came out. It was completely empty.
"There!" I said definitively, plunging my hands into the careful arrangement of fruit and leaves and tossing it all about in a hopeless effort to distribute the ‘dressing’, "Balsamic-soused baby spinach!" and I swept the bowl onto the middle of the dining table with a flourish.
"Well, the beef looks lovely," said one of the Dads.
"A bit on the underdone side, perhaps?" said the woman who doesn’t eat raw spinach or anything else that hasn’t been thoroughly cremated, obviously.
"It is carpaccio of venison, actually…" I said -
"You do know that we are vegetarian?" said one of the other Mums
-"… in a pomegranate marinade."
"Oh my God, venison! That’s like deer, isn’t it?" said a woman, who was clearly on the ball.
"Yes. We have a friend who has an estate in Scotland."
"You mean he shot one of his deer?" said Mrs. On-the-Ball, horrified. "With a gun? So you could eat it?"
"Well, yes. I expect so. I don’t think he has a Light Saber," I said.
"You have a friend with an estate in Scotland?" said Mrs. Overcooked.
"Did someone say something about Star Wars?" said The Husband.
"There’s plenty of Wild Rice with toasted Pine Nuts, Almonds and Pistachios," I said to Mrs. Secret Vegetarian.
"Oh, my God, Michael has a Nut Allergy! Thank God you actually warned us in time," said Mrs. Overcooked, "or my husband might have ended up in anaphylactic shock on your kitchen floor!!"
"That would have been quite ghastly…" said Mrs. Secret Vegetarian looking straight at the collection of toast crumbs, wood lice, dried pasta and children’s crayons that I keep in case of emergencies just visible around the bottom of the fridge.
Under this kind of pressure, coupled with the effort of having to breathe in for six hours (in case I bulged in a very non-yummy mummy way over the top of my magic knickers) and the strain on my poor bunions, I think it is perfectly reasonable to have ended the evening dancing barefoot on the table with my elephant pants on my head pretending to be Obi-Wan Kenobi. Perfectly reasonable.
Anyway, now we have moved into a bigger house and I no longer have the Smallest Kitchen in the World, it seems sensible to have another party - although this time, Mrs Fussy Knickers is welcome…
Because obviously the whole damn lot of us girls have been malingering at home for the last sixty thousand years, lolling about on chaises longues while scoffing chocolate and gin by the bucketload and having a kip.
