Re: Stretching dinner

Serene Vannoy wrote:
My friends know that 7pm is dinner here, and around once a week, someone takes me up on my open-door dinner policy and crashes dinner. I love this. Sometimes it's easy to make another plate, because there's a pot of chili on the stove or something. Tonight it was a little more tricky, since I had just enough of the main dish for three people. It was store-bought ravioli, for which I'd made a tomato sauce. I'd also roasted a couple heads of garlic to put on slices of baguette, and roasted a small amount of green beans (enough for three generous servings, or four small ones).

My guest showed up around 6:45, so I quickly got out another pot and boiled up some spaghetti. I tossed it with butter/salt/pepper/parmesan, and cut more slices of baguette. The guest helped with putting roasted garlic and butter on the bread slices, and dinner went off without a hitch, and without a mention of having planned on having less food. She may have thought it was weird having two pasta dishes on the plate, but she didn't say anything. I figured, heck, you can get half-and-half at some Italian places. :-)

Do you have any stretching-dinner stories? I know some of you don't like it when people show up unannounced, and I totally understand that, but my friends have my express permission to do so, so any intimation that she was being rude will be dismissed as silly.

When we have unexpected dinner guests it generally doesn't cause too much trouble because I always plan for an extra two or three servings of whatever protein I'm making so as to have enough for lunches the next day (we can always have pb&j instead).

Slicing up the main dish myself before serving usually results in smaller serving sizes than letting teenaged boys carve off their own hunks of meat.

Adding a loaf of garlic bread and/or a bowl of pasta with garlic butter and parmesan cheese, a plate full of sliced fresh fruit or a bowl of grapes or cherries and a gallon of milk is usually plenty to fill in the gaps.

If the kids are still peckish afterwards they always have permission to raid the freezer for ice cream, or they can make brownies.

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