Has this happened to you ?

Amberdog, my granny's saying was " clean meat never fattened a pig"!

I don't think I've ever scraped anything up, but I've certainly picked things up.

We're too clean nowadays anyway!

I had just finished decorating a surprise birthday cake for DS when he and his wife arrived early. I hurriedly hid it on a chair at the back of the kitchen table while he passed through into the garden where we were barbecuing. In the space of twenty seconds the dog removed all the strawberries off the top of the cake. I replaced them and put more cream over everything and no one was any the wiser - or suffered afterwards!

I was a young mum, and mother-in-law was due for Sunday lunch. Opened the fridge door and out tottered a big bluebottle. To my spellbound horror it had laid eggs in the folds between the meat in my expensive leg of pork. No shops open in those days, and no money to replace it, so I washed it vigorously under the tap, poured vinegar over it and left to soak as long as possible before roasting in a very hot oven for a very long time. Everyone commented on its tenderness and, as far as I know, suffered no after effects!

Don't like to think of food wastage so if floor's clean I wouldn't hesitate.
However someone else's response reminded me of an incident in our early married life when I'd invited a visiting aunt and uncle to come for 'high tea'.
Had got out an ironed tablecloth, the best china, inherited from my mum, and made dainty sandwiches, salad , various cakes and a rather good looking trifle in a cut glass bowl which was the piece de resistance.
Two minutes before the visitors were due to arrive I did a last check on the table and to my horror saw our big grey hairy cat ,aptly named Pudding, on the table with her nose and whiskers in the trifle.
I threw her out and instinctively, without even thinking, smoothed over the cream on top of the trifle with a knife and was ready with a smile as the doorbell rang....
No ill effects reported but i don't think I had any trifle myself....

My floor is always pretty clean so I wouldn't hesitate to call on the 'ten second rule'. I would baulk at broken glass or china and I definitely wouldn't eat anything pets were around.

To be honest I haven't dropped anything for years but I do remember a stray filo tart which somehow made it intact (how I don't know) back onto the plate. Nobody knew and nobody died.

These tales have given me a good laugh this morning!
I particulary liked the cat delicately licking off all the castor sugar one, the roast turkey and pigs in blankets one, and the goats cheese and pepper tart which ended up in the geraniums.Keep these stories coming please.?
I have never dropped meals in this way ( as others say, the odd errant sausage, which now and then escape the George Foreman grill.)

I remember one Christmas Eve taking a plateful of chicken casserole into the dining room and shooting it off the plate onto the chair (cream cover - it was never the same). Sister and sons all laughed at my horror (it was her plate) and I scraped most up and had it myself while she had mine!

My mum baked a beautiful steak pie for tea ...then dropped it as she removed it from the oven. I am sure she would have scraped it up to feed her five hungry children, but the dog got there first!!!

It depends on how "scrapeable" the dinner was.

On the dreadful occasion I dropped a hot goats cheese and red pepper tart as I was taking it out to the car, to go to a pot luck supper, the tart slipped on the baking sheet I was holding and turned upside down on the path and flower bed under my front window. I have to say that for a brief moment I thought of rescuing it but it was upside among the geraniums.

If nothing else it gave my friends a good laugh.

Greymary it has certainly happened more than once in our family and we ate the dinner anyway and suffered no ill effects. My friend has a sampler in her kitchen which states "The 10 second rule applies here"!

Don't suppose there is a household in the land which hasn't eaten a 'floored dinner' - knowingly or not!

My aunt was a wonderful cook but she was five feet nothing so when she tripped as she was transferring a large roast turkey to her hostess trolley, it shot across the kitchen like Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb.

She calmly picked up the 'not supposed to be portioned' bird and arranged it on the serving dish with all the trimmings. My brothers and I were thus denied the joy of watching her wield her weapon of mass destruction electric carving knife which was usually the highlight of Christmas Day

This thread reminds of an episode of the award winning American comedy series called Everybody Loves Raymond, which is a masterclass in family friction. There's an episode about Thanksgiving where the MiL is being her usual nightmare self and driving the DiL up the wall, but as usual the son won't stand up to the MiL.

Debra drops the turkey

scoop, not scoopy!

I wouldn't scoopy anything sloppy off the floor and serve it, but the odd errant sausage or roast potato is fine IMO.

One Christmas the whole turkey slid out of the roasting tin when I took it out to baste it - I certainly wasn't going to throw that in the bin in case of a few germs...

I have dropped meals but can't rmember if we ate all of it or some of it. But I was in a restaurant and ordered lamb chops. Then we heard a crash of falling plates and there was a time span until my meal arrived. Although they waited I am convinced my chops were those that had landed on the floor. Couldn't prove it though.
As long as there is no broken glass you might as well eat it after all our immune system should be able to cope with a few household germs.

This conversation has reminded me of the time we were invited by friends of friends to a dinner party. Quite a posh affair but as the evening wore on and the wine flowed, the hostess revealed to her friend in a stage whisper that she had lost a false "stick-on" fingernail in the casserole .

I don't know who else had heard what was said, but I passed on the casserole when it came my way.

Whole cooked turkey that threw itself off the serving platter and skedaddled across the kitchen floor with its accompanying pigs in blankets shooting under the cooker and fridge.
The turkey was reinstated on a serving dish and the pigs in blankets eventually rounded up and binned.
Never told a soul......

An old saying I recall from my own dear departed Gran was - you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die. I have never had the misfortune to drop a whole meal on the floor - perhaps a stray sausage - but the event that sticks in my mind is that of visiting a friend's house for coffee, who had an extremely bad tempered, spoiled and overweight cat - who sat and slept anywhere he wished- and was treated like a child.

As we went into the kitchen, after coffee was finished, we found aforesaid "Boy" just finishing the delicate licking of the caster sugar off the 6th Victoria sponge my friend had made for a Round Table Ladies Circle event.

No - I did not ask !

Only last night, except that the unfortunate cook was DD and not me.
The dish containing the chicken korma she had made slipped out of her hands and the contents went down the cooker door (between the two glass panels), the cupboard door, and over the floor.
She and I ate the korma and she microwaved something from the freezer for the DGCs and DSiL.
Guess who cleaned the mess up!

Nearest I've come is to flip a chicken casserole upside down as I took it out of the oven. Most of it fell onto the pull down oven door. What didn't drip through onto the floor was scooped up and decanted back into a fresh dish, swiftly reheated and served to waiting friends, who knew nothing about it (and suffered no ill effects). Job's a good 'un! It justified my insistence when we moved that we needed a dining room separated from the kitchen!

Back in the 70s when money was short, I dropped two plates of home made curry onto the carpet. I scooped it up and we ate it anyway and it was delicious with no ill effects.

greymary when I was a young newlywed wife and my "signature dish" was spagbol I came into the diningroom with a flourish carrying the plates having opened the door with a thrust of my hip and this showing off caused the food to sweep off the plates and onto the floor (well most of it). We ate off the (clean) floor! in fits of giggles.

Indi, Sloe, Wilma, Alea. Thank you.

It tasted fine and took a lot of preparation, would hate the waste !!

Anya - I live at the end of nowhere, 'takeaways' are unheard of here.

Friends to lunch when Grace was a younger dog. I glanced through from the sitting room to see her with front legs firmly up on the table as she "quality controlled " the Salade Niçoise

Many years ago, when we were short of money, DH bought himself a very rare treat - an Indian takeaway. He popped it in the oven to keep warm, and when he was ready for it, I went out to the kitchen to serve it out for him. I dropped it on the floor, upside down, the lid came off and it was all over the kitchen floor. My gasp of horror was stifled so he wouldn't come and investigate. The floor had been cleaned only a few hours previously, so .... I hurriedly scooped all the curry back into the tin foil container, cleared up the telltale yellow mess on the floor, and served his meal out I couldn't bear the thought of him going without after looking forward to it so much. He tucked in with relish and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don't think I ever told him. And he's still here, fighting fit, 35 years later

#whatyoudon'tknowwon'thurtyou