Dinners have been later than planned on more than one occasion (timing is always an issue, especially with only one oven!), but the guests never seemed to mind, thankfully. And there was at least one dinner where I forgot to serve a side dish or salad. But I'm happy to report, no major disasters that ruined the whole evening.

And considering that I used dinner parties as a reason to try a new recipe, I'm going to consider myself even luckier!

i was going to make the velveeta/rotel dip but was on a health kick and thought i'd use healthier cheese instead. the cheese never melted and to this day, my friend asks me about my "watery cheese soup." ...not my finest moment ;)

Kate a' la http://southernbellesimple.blogspot.com

Hmm, we've had main dishes that managed to turn out not-as-wonderful as they were when we made them for ourselves, but that wasn't the end of the world, I guess. We made up for it with an amazing dessert!

I regularly invite people over for dinner or big, late lunches on the weekends. I always serve dishes I've made at least once before. The only disaster was when too many people RSVPed yes to my tiny Manhattan apartment. Nobody said no and usually I have about a 65% yes rate! I had to call people who hadn't responded yet and explain the situation. One close friend graciously said she couldn't make it after all when she heard about my plight. Luckily, the uninvitees were very understanding and one of them ended up my boyfriend and we're still together more than a year later.

We have a semi-regular Sunday Supper with a rotating cast of friends and family, and my husband almost always tries a new main course recipe out on them (I am a not a meat eater so I seldom test the product!). He has over-brined chicken and had similar small crisis, but no one EVER complains. A very full menu and lots of wine keep guests of all types happy - most are just grateful that we're doing the cooking!

I think my worst was when I invited a bunch of people over for a backyard bbq... then got so drunk I had to have someone else cook, and on top of that I couldn't find any of the extra food that I had bought so someone else had to go to the store. Horrible!

I decided to make a dinner of swedish meatballs for my in-laws one night - to take them back in time to kitchy entertianing food from their day. I was so flustered cooking for them that I didn't notice that my panko breadcrumbs had gone bad (they smelled like plastic) until I had all ready incorperated them. I continued on thinking somehow it would work out - then I bit into one and realized I would not be able to serve them to someone with working tastebuds.

All I can think of is Bridget Jones' blue soup

i had my boss and his wife and HIS boss and his wife over for dinner... my husband got called to work (hes on call all the time) so i was on my own to entertain. I made a roast chicken and i guess my oven didnt cook as fast as most (i didnt know this as we had just moved into a new house) so when my boss carved the chicken it was raw inside... we had to pick apart the cooked pieces and had mostly sides for dinner. the sides were fabulous if i do say so myself tho!

oh, i also had my husbands childhood friends over for a reunion once, there were about 30 of us there so i asked everyone to bring the sides and i thought i would cook a turkey (since it was so close to thanksgiving) again, ended up eating the sides for dinner as i cooked a 25 lb turkey and it took about 4 hours longer than i read that it would... i guess poultry isnt my thing.

There was that one time when the chicken NEVER cooked - after hours and hours and hours in the oven. I think the oven might've been broken or at least not functioning well.

And then there was the other time when the zucchini pancakes stuck to everything except each other AND ALSO the pork shoulder was extremely fatty and chewy and gross. It was the first time we'd entertained in our new apartment and both of us neared complete melt-down as we got in each other's way trying to save the dinner.

And then there was the time we were going to braise a pork shoulder for Thanksgiving, but realized when it was time to start cooking that our cast iron wasn't seasoned. Fortunately that time we were only cooking for 4, and we all just went out for dinner and had Thanksgiving the next day.

All of these explain why I preface many a dinner with "if it sucks, we'll order a pizza."

I used to always apologize for the meals I served guests. My husband finally asked me to stop apologizing when people came over. I ruined (e.g. burned) at least three elements of the next dinner, but I didn't say a word about it. He was mortified, and it wasn't easy for me, but it was good training for me, a perfectionist who thought I needed to apologize all the time!

Renai Marie... that is awesome.

My disaster is having people over for "Thanksgiving dessert"... so friends could do their family thing than come over later to our place. Any way, I made a few pies but every one of them was too full - so their middles dripped over to the bottom of the oven. End result - our place smelled like burning and the pies looked pitiful. Still tasted good though.

Even those who burn or oversalt or end up with less-than-perfect pies... PLEASE keep inviting us (the non-cookers!) over for dinner.

It will still probably be the best dinner we've had all week. :)

I am reminded, though, of one of the RARE instances of non-family dinner guests in our family home growing up, where, in a rain of sparks, the overhead light fixture plummeted squarely into a large bowl of mashed potatoes.

smellofsawdust--

You remind me a bit of my Mom. She puts tremendous pressure on herself (especially at holidays) and she constantly apologizes and frets when every plate or bowl hits the table. ("Is it hot enough???" is my absolute favorite.)

She is never right, of course, since she has pretty much perfected those menus in her (insert a long timespan here) years of pie-crust rolling and turkey-roasting.

Stop worrying! We are delighted to be invited!

My last dinner (well, lunch, really) party was awful. I was making French Onion soup for the first time, even ran out and bought those cute handled bowls for it, and trusted Alton Brown to see me through. Well, something isn't right with that recipe because even with SIX POUNDS of onions (double what was supposed to be in it) it was horribly, horribly vinegary. I was mortified but my hungry guests took it in stride and we had bread and cheese and cake for our very delayed lunch. They all found it pretty funny but I'm still irked about it.

I really do need to learn not to test new recipes on guests.

One hot, summer Sunday afternoon I was hanging out at the homestead in hubby's old worn out boxers and a wife beater and the phone rang. I answered it, and the caller was my hub's best friend's wife, who said that she was very sorry that they were running late, but they would be there in about five minutes.

I told her not to worry about it- that we were looking forward to seeing them. Once I got off the phone, I gave the hubs a quick WTF, to which he responded that he had forgotten to mention that he had invited them for dinner.

Anyway, I scrambled around very quickly to pull together an appetizer platter, a salad, thaw some meat, and swap the tattered boxers and wife beater for a sundress before they arrived.

The four of us had a lovely dinner, until it came time to serve dessert, and I had to admit I had nothing to offer. There was a moment of awkward silence before I decided to simply tell them what had happened.

Dinner didn't turn out to be a disaster, though, and since then hub's best friend's wife always calls to double check that I am actually aware of any plans that the four of us might have. And I got brownie points for being such a good sport about the surprise dinner party. ;)

I had a new friend over for dinner once and was trying out a baked fish recipe when the pyrex dish containing the fish shattered in the oven. The food was ruined, the oven was a mess, the house was stinky . . . but we managed to scrounge together something to eat and had a good time anyway!

I made a party snack mix last new years. It seemed fine except I hadnt tasted the sesame sticks and the were rancid! the whole bowl sat there barely touched all night. So embarrassing. The same night my aioli broke.
However, everyone had fun. They all said that the aioli tasted fine anyway.

I was making a jambalaya for my then boyfriend (now husband) in an effort to impress him with my amazing culinary skills. I melted a rubber spatula in to the roux while drinking wine and flirting - all secure and confident! Whoops! To this day, I can't order or make jambalaya without a "hmm, do you taste something different? Could it be ... plastic?"

For Christmas Eve this year we had lots of people coming over. Until the ice/snow storm hit. I had been cooking for days and had enough food for 30 (I also always cook too much) and ended up with about 10. We ate leftovers until they went bad. We didn't even have room in the fridge for half the stuff. It was really sad.

Fajitas. Bloody and Cold. Never Again.

for thanksgiving with the in-laws, i was in charge of dessert. i baked the night before.

the pumpkin cupcakes came out fine, as did the coffeecake for thanksgiving breakfast. i made four pumpkin pies, each more disastrous than the previous. i was up until 2:00 am, the apt smelled like burning, dying sugar and i was out of cream, pumpkin and patience. i decided to give it one last try (apple pie instead), and luckily it worked out.

sadly, i was exhausted, slept through most of thanksgiving day (my in-laws are very, very forgiving) and my husband woke me up for dinner.

Someone tell me what a "wife beater" is. Such unpleasantness is conjured....

Kitty, it refers to those thin, tight, ribbed white tank tops that are now pretty ubiquitous. I've become inured to the term, but there certainly are unpleasant connotations conjured up for some!

a "muscle shirt"

When I was 11 my mom agreed to let me show off for a few of my friends by making the one dish I knew how to make: spaghetti with tomato sauce.

It was all going fine, except I couldn't figure out why the sauce kept on tasting like raw tomatoes. I eventually realized that I had never turned the heat on under the tomato sauce, but by then the pasta had cooked and I figured I would just serve it anyway.

Thankfully my friends were as clueless as food as I was and ate it up without any complaints. Now I always check that the stove is on!

We were living in a townhouse identical to all the other ones on the street. One of our friends was a bit late for our party. He called and said he was next to a fire hydrant, but couldn't remember our address. One of the other guests answered and told him "That's the one! Come on in! We're all here."

Well, he did enter the door, but it turned out, there were TWO fire hydrants on our street, and he was at the wrong one. When he opened the door, there was a rather inhospitable Rottweiler on the other side.

When he finally found our house, he strolled in bare-chested with his arm wrapped in a bloody shirt. We spent the rest of the party in the waiting room at the ER. 50-something stitches later, it was probably the most memorable dinner party ever, though not for the food :)

One New Year's Eve I was hosting not just a dinner party, but my first dinner party when my brilliant apartment complex decided to shut off all of the water in the afternoon for some basic maintenance. Somehow things went wrong and they weren't able to get it turned back on until late in the night. I had a half prepared meal and the world's messiest kitchen - dirty pots, pans, dishes were everywhere! I ended up serving the first courses I managed to prepare and bought BBQ from across the street for the rest. At least we all got a good laugh from it.

@Cojo--that's terrible!

I had sort of an opposite problem once... my dog got loose one night and ended up crashing a neighbor's party. He must have slipped in the door when other (human) guests were walking in. He's very social, obviously.

Luckily, the neighbors recognized my dog and brought him back.

My boyfriend and I invited three friends over for dinner one summer at our tiny DC apartment. I was just out of college and pretty rusty about cooking, but we had a Rachael Ray cookbook and the stuff we'd picked out- bruschetta, pasta with vodka cream sauce- didn't look too difficult, even though we'd never made the recipes before.

The cookbook said to "keep an eye on" the bruschetta toast in the broiler, which I took to mean "check it every 5 minutes or so," which is why I was pulling FLAMING toast from the oven at the exact moment our guests arrived. We closed the door from the kitchen to the living room to try to contain the smoke, but the AC unit was in the living room, which left me in a sweltering kitchen trying to finish the pasta and salvage the bruschetta.

So in the end, I was drenched in sweat for our smoky-scented dinner; the vodka sauce turned out definitely weird; and we ate the bruschetta topping on the only bread product left in our place after I'd torched the baguette- frozen bagels.

I had the kitchen sink back up about an hour before a dinner party. The guests arrived to find the RotoRooter truck in the driveway and I finished cooking and serving dinner, stepping over the portion of the Rooter Man that was sticking out from under my sink. The guests were good sports and the food was fine. I think I had a little more gin than usual though.

Oh yes: http://www.adinnerparty.net/2008/09/sparkling-ginger-cocktails-assorted.html

@KittyAtlanta- My apologies are offered. I certainly had no intention of conjuring unpleasantness. For the future, I will remember to say "tank top" instead.

In December 2008 I was living with my then fiance now husband in Cairo as he is a student here. We were moving out of our apartment at the end of the week, I was going back to the states to finish my degree before we got married and he had to find a new apartment after he returned to Cairo after the holidays. He decided to invite people over for a taco night and even though I thought it was not the best idea to invite people over right before we had to move I wanted to spend some time with the people I would not see for the next 8 moths while I was in the states. So we spent several days cleaning the apartment and moved the furniture around and hours and hours chopping up tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cheese, ect for the 10 or so people coming for the taco night. The appointed hour of the party came and went and no one showed up. Finally we started making calls to see where people were and they had all decided not to come or had had something come up and were not going to make it. This was also my first dinner party. I was not happy to say the least. Also since we were moving most of the food went to waste.

Some family friends asked if I would help make gnocchi for a dinner with our families. I had studied in Italy for 4 months and attended a cooking class where we made gnocchi, so I felt pretty confident. It was so simple when we made it with the teacher...but our potato dumplings were not cooking quite right in the water. We ended up having gnocchi lumpy mashed potatoes instead. Still tasted good, though!

A camel once spit on me a few hours before an extremely posh dinner party. No amount of showering could get rid of the smell and all evening people kept sniffing and giving me odd looks.

I was having our first party after we got married, and my husband helped me plan all the food to serve. I made enough for about 20 people, which took a considerable amount of time and effort, but only 2 people showed up because of the sudden change in weather. They hardly touched any of it. :/