Ok, one of the punching bag threads has prompted me to ask what I have been thinking of for a while.

Are people food restrictions ever happy with the effort that their not so food restricted counterparts put in when catering for them. I ask this as we have one person in our group of friends who no matter what we do, she is just never happy and openly complains. She claims to be a vegetarian, but eats chicken and fish, so I am not sure what the term for that is. Anyway that makes catering for her actually not too bad, but in her eyes we never get it right.

example 1: We are very well known for our BBQ's, we put on a lot of good quality food. We do cater for vegetarians (even though DH does joke that he wont). There is one vegetarian friend who is always happy with what we put on. Anyway we do make an effort for this friend, when we knew all the meat was going to be red, we went out and bought her some chicken and told everyone that it was hers. Made seperate batches of some dishes, so some were with meat, some without etc. Our dip, nibbles platter is always 90% vegie friendly and always huge! Well she complained that the chicken was too big and did we expect her to eat it all? We thought better too much than not enough.

example 2: Maggie's 2nd birthday. Admittedly the focus was more on kiddie food, but I did change the menu and bought extra food to cater for the fact she was coming. I pointed out to her the items that were ok for her(which was most) and that not too worry, more food was coming the moment it was out of the oven. To which she commented "Oh, I am used to you not catering for me!"

There are many, many more examples. So is this attitude typical? It is getting to the point where we are going to refuse to specifically cater for her if she complains again and it also means we are very reluctant to go to the effort for others. It really makes us wonder if anyone is ever happy about the fact that someone has put in the effort to take into account their needs and that any effort we put in is never going to be good enough.

On a personal note I can't stand onion and I am always grateful when people remember that and limit the onion in a dish. I never ask for all onion to be removed, just please don't put heaps of onion in every dish. I take the same attitude when catering for others.