One Christmas--our first married Christmas, which we were celebrating alone--I dropped the baked parmesan mashed potatoes face down on the door of the oven as I took them out. I began to freak out, but a calm husband made me see the humor in it.

The first year I had my own place and was making my own pie crust for Thanksgiving pies, the dough went from super-sticky and un-rollable to over-floured and un-rollable in about ten minutes. That one took me under--the dough was thrown against the wall. Whoops. :) That's probably the worst kitchen tantrum I've ever thrown.

Good post. In regard to what to keep on hand: It's best to keep on hand YOUR OWN favorite ingredients -- stuff you can quickly whip up into a dish you know and love. So by all means keep an emergency stash -- but it needs to be stuff you know how to handle!

Bottom line: In ten years, no one will remember. Keep the pizza and chinese delivery menus at hand, take a deep breath and relax!

My first pie crust was a tantrum-inducing experience, too. Hole-y, sticky dough that I was trying to roll out with a vase (didn't have a rolling pin). There was much screaming and crying. But it got worse. When the pie was assebled and ready to go in the oven (ugly crust and all) I discovered that my "preheated oven" was ice-cold- my range had bitten the dust. More hysterics. And kicking. I should add that this was Thanksgiving Day. Ugh.

I should add that I kept practicing over the years (bought a rolling pin) and now make a more-than-just-decent crust.

an hour before my housewarming for my very first "home" with it's newly remodeled but not tested kitchen, the dishwasher backed up, which caused the kitchen sink to basically explode. Sending water, and sludge throughout the kitchen. (The plumber forgot to take a cap off a pipe or something which lead to it all being fixed for free later...)

After the meltdown when my friends and the ordered pizzas arrived, I did manage to take in that everyone had a great time, and that even at a housewarming, it's not the house that's the central character.

Once I attended a Thanksgiving dinner party where the hostess was in complete freak-out mode the entire time. She sent her boyfriend and a guest to the store at the last minute to retrieve cheese spreaders (because a butter knife wasn't good enough), and when they returned empty-handed, she screamed at the them in front of everyone and then cried and gave all of us the silent treatment throughout the meal. I don't remember what we ate, or how the food tasted, or even what utensil I used to spread my cheese, but I will NEVER forget her terrible behavior. I remember that whenever I am hosting a party -- a hostess is above all supposed to show her guests a good time. You want them to leave thinking fondly of how charming you were.

Lovely summer day, and I was making gazpahco for a 3 person dinner that evening. My little galley kitchen was full of flavour and colour from the ingredients. I knew it was best to hand chop the vegetables, but was in a bit of a hurry, so out came the blender. If only the blender TOP had come out, too! What a mess! We ended up going out to a local vegetarian place for dinner, after the biggest kitchen clean-up I’ve ever done. Now I hand chop, and always the day before.

Many disasters, many great stories! I love the suspense in reading these stories. My best advice is to use it baby! We all know good music, a nice strong cocktail at the beginning of the meal for your guests, and a good mix of people will make them all enjoy it in the end. As for the cook? A good deep belly laugh does wonders, and keeping your cool enough to remember everything that happens. Do your best to make it edible, and write it all down the next morning. Much is learned from a dinner party disaster.

Haha... I'm sensing there are some great stories in the woodwork waiting to come out.

At Thanksgiving last year I clumsily threw a cooked dish of roasted squash for 11 across the kitchen floor in alarm when father popped into the kitchen doorway asking me a question.

The year before (my first Thanksgiving) I didn't place an order as I assumed that whole turkeys would be in stock in the UK by November, to discover on the day before the meal that the only birds were frozen with a three-day defrost estimate. Now I'll only buy from the butcher on our street, and order with a month to spare!

As a child, I learned this lesson from my mother on the night of the Flying Chicken.

It was a posh dinner party for my father's colleagues, including his boss and his boss's boss. Everyone was dolled up and enjoying cocktails in the candle-lit open-plan living room/dining room adjacent to the brightly lit kitchen. This meant that they had a full view of my mother removing the rich and enormous casserole from the oven, and also a full view of the dish slipping from her hands, flipping upside-down, and landing on the kitchen floor.

My mother earned a marvelous reputation as a hostess that night when, without crying or wailing or cursing, she turned to my father with a laugh and said, "I hope everyone likes Kentucky Fried Chicken!" She cleaned up quickly, sent him to get take-out, and kept everyone entertained until he returned. The guests were very impressed with her cool.

(I found out recently that the scorching hot Flying Chicken warped the brand new flooring. Now, that, I might have freaked over.)

I will also admit my own too-frequent freak-out: I never freak out in front of guests, but I am prone to getting cross in the hour or so before people arrive.

My partner and I have very different entertaining and planning styles, and his last-minute approach used to make me feel pressured to prepare everything myself ahead of time. Then I realized: just because that's my way doesn't make it the only way! His approach suits him fine, and I just step out of the way.

Nowadays, we split duties and tackle our own tasks independently. I do my leisurely, well-planned prep work well ahead and make sure to leave the kitchen empty for him in the last hour or so before the party. That means I'm usually in the living room tweaking the lights or choosing music, a drink in my hand and a smile on my face, when guests arrive.

I was having a dinner party with two of my best friends and a new roommate. I'd had a lovely plum-and-blackberries-in-rosemary-syrup dessert planned -- I had to bring sliced plums, water, sugar, and a sprig of rosemary to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer them for ten minutes; then add the blackberries at the last minute and serve. The sliced plums were supposed to be intact, but soft, suffused with rosemary. The blackberries would be just warm. It sounded wonderful.

I put the plums on the heat, raving about how good it sounded to my guests; I went to the table to join them, intending ot check back on the plums in a couple minutes and turn the heat down once it came to a boil.

....But I forgot.

And then finally went back into the kitchen 15 minutes later -- after raving to everyone again about how wonderful this dessert was going to be -- to see plum soup at a rolling boil.

I just turned it off, blinked a bit, and then cheerfully stuck my head out the kitchen door. "Okay, what does everyone say to fresh blackberries with whipped cream for dessert instead?" I chirped. They all laughed and said why, that sounded just great. So we had that instead.

(I turned the boiled-to-death plums into a granita for myself later instead -- so I got a bonus out of it!)

My mother was having Thanksgiving at her house one year, and it seemed that everyone we knew was coming. Everything was going fairly smoothly until my mother burned the second batch of potatoes. She started freaking out, so I grabbed some ranch dressing and bacon bits and tossed those in, mashed them up, and told my mom to serve them. Wouldn't you know that those potatoes went faster than the regular ones?!

I recently tried to make moussaka for myself but upended the entire casserole just as I was about to pour the bechamel on top. I ended up turning the bechamel into a tomato cream sauce that I served with pasta and broccoli. There might have been some cursing between those two events, though.

I was a young newlywed making dinner for the first time for my husband's German family. I decided to make burritos (yeah, yeah, I know, but I was 23) but since we were in Germany there were no flour tortillas to be found. We went to a library (no epicurious back then) and found a recipe for how to make your own tortillas from flour and water and maybe a bit of salt. After an afternoon of toil I ended up with these small, thick, leathery tortillas that could hardly be bent, never mind rolled. In the process we had completely destroyed my brother-in-law's two expensive alessi frying pans. Then my mother-in-law, who had never eaten a burrito in her life, decided to "help" me with the black beans and adjusted the spices and liquid until they were essentially lentil soup. I was mortified, but at this meal I learned less about being a flexible host and more about being a gracious guest... I can still remember my sister-in-law struggling to hold the unfoldable burrito, black bean soup dripping out, saying "ahh, das ist fein".