My Dad was a meat and 2 veg kind of guy. We always had a hot meal in the evening, but Sundays we had a traditional roast dinner with all the trimmings around 1pm.
Over the years, both when my sister and I were living at home and after we flew the parental nest to make our own way through life, students of various ages and nationalities stayed with the family, some of which still send Mum a Christmas card.
A thirty year old Italian gentleman cooked for them on several occasions during his two month stay, and introduced Dad to spaghetti and lasagna dishes. Mum also experimented with curries, but Dad still favoured his roast beef, yorkshire pudding and the like.
Our previous dog could sit in five languages thanks to the students Hubby and I had stay with us.
Through a language school, we had German, French, Spanish and Lithuanian students, though privately I also had an Italian boy stay with us for a month.
One German girl was a vegetarian, which I didn’t know until she had arrived.
I tried to rise to the occasion and prepared meals that could or could not have meat, and cheese dishes that we liked anyway. She was no trouble, helped me shop and cook, and actually put on weight during her stay, so I must have been doing something right.
A year or so later, we had 2 German girls come and stay, and the only diet stipulation we were given was that they were not to be given British Beef in any shape or form.
Their packed lunch was to include a piece of fruit, carrot and cucumber sticks and carton of juice along with a sandwich or filled roll, cake and/or crisps.
I can only describe these two girls as slobs.
They were untidy, never made their beds and their room looked like a bomb had hit it.
I value my privacy and respect other peoples, as does Hubby, and so apart from pushing the hoover over the parts of the floor we could see (avoiding g-string thongs that had a habit of committing suicide up the nozzle) and putting their clean laundry on their (unmade) beds, we left their room alone.
Meal times were dreadful for the first few days as they were really faddy and ate very little. ‘I’m a vegetarian’, was one of the few perfect sentences they could say in English and I honestly did my best.
I served several meat free pasta dishes, and the spaghetti bolognese was an instant hit as it was basically a mix of tomatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms and a handful of herbs topped with cheese.
They had seconds of that, and I always made sure we had a dessert to fill the gap a main meal they didn’t like may have left.
We had to collect them from the college one evening after a field trip, and were surprised to see them with two rather large familiar burgers halfway to their mouths.
They had the decency to look sheepish when we said ‘Vegetarian eh,’ in unison.
Apparently they had a McD practically every day (heaven knows what happened to the carefully packed ‘official’ lunches I gave them every morning) .
We didn’t mention they were made with British beef.
pensitivity101 