Dream Come Dine With Me - Episode 2

Finally a follow up to the first episode of my personal dream series of 'Come Dine With Me', with contemporary issues yet again playing as big a role as the actual food featured in the show...

While last week's episode was themed around the "big" issues of race, religion and sexuality, this one on the other hand was more focused on the family and the interpersonal relationships between its individual members.

Host one, for example, held a traditional wedding feast, which while scoring highly on the ambience, lost out on food points due to the menu's typically Czech predominance of meat and dumplings at every single bloody course (classic real-life example). Couple number two, rather unfortunately, had just lost their son, so the theme was rather depressingly funereal, with everyone required to dress in black and conversation not exactly flowing as a result... My own event, however, was divorce based, which basically meant having to host a dinner at my Dad's old house, where I used to live in convivial disarray with him and my little brother. To my horror (but not exactly surprise) though on this occasion, I discovered that no-one had done the shopping, most of the food in the fridge had gone mouldy, and all we had in the cupboards was dried pasta and a jar of curry-flavoured Chicken Tonight. Then my mum (who'd left the family home in real life as in dream) randomly decided to come back to us after all, and I hugged her tightly and cried hot, undignified tears of sheer and utter relief (apparently forgetting, at least temporarily, about impending dinner party disaster...).

So all in all not quite such a riotous event as dream number one (in which I at least got a bloody curry), but oh well - let's see what episode three will bring... ;-))