Hostess with the mostest

If our friends who are coming over tonight for drinks and snacks are reading this, please look away.

No, really, find something else to read. A book perhaps? A magazine? The ingredient list on your packet of cereal?

(Are they gone? Good.)

So! We're having some friends over tonight for drinks and snacks. So we got up early to make this place suitable for habitation again. You know: chase the mice away, sweep the dust under the carpet, put our wild, ferocious cats back into their boxes.

I had planned on making most of the aforementioned snacks myself. I used to love doing that, before I discovered running and it was suddenly taking up so much of my time and energy that the only food I cared about preparing was pasta the day before a long run. Feeling nostalgic now that this running obsession is put on hold, I lovingly devised a snacks menu. I made a list of the ingredients I needed, and we went to the supermarket.

A thing you didn't know about J and me but you're about to find out even if you're not interested: We hate supermarkets. We usually go there early in the morning to avoid the crowds. We have a list we stick to, quickly throw the items we need into the cart (trying to shut our ears against the oral onslaught of ads trying to convince us to buy things we don't need blaring through the speakers everywhere around the store) and get out of there as soon as possible.

So after this morning's traumatic experience, fencing off slow pensioners with their carts parked across the aisles, screaming toddlers with indifferent (or deaf) parents and supermarket cleaning staff trying to run us over with their big cleaning machines, we walked back into our flat with 5 heavy bags of shopping only to discover that we had forgotten to buy not one, but two vital ingredients.

It might have been my fault. I wrote down one of the ingredients on the back side of the paper and then just didn't flip it over.

The silence as J and I looked at each other, the realisation of this mistake's implications slowly sinking in, was deafening. I went through the list of viable options in my head: A) go back to the supermarket or B) improvise. Of course, if I improvise, I either succeed and the snacks turn out great or the night is a disaster and our friends go home hungry, shaking their heads in disgust in our obvious lack of cooking and hosting skills, making scathing remarks under their breath about the canapés and never wanting to return.

If you think I picked A, then you have clearly not been paying attention.