Today concludes a 4 day weekend in Taiwan and I spent it in small town Taiwan where I met my girlfriend's parents for the first time. Both of them are retired professors of botany.
Yesterday morning, having been invited the day before, I left the house at 6:30 AM with her parents and a few of their friends to go bird watching - rather, her husband took pictures of birds while the mom and I chatted.
We chatted for about four hours and, aside from referring to a dictionary quite frequently, it went very smoothly. This was the first conversation I've had in Mandarin longer than 15-20 minutes and having it go so well was a huge boost to my confidence.
Come dinner that night her mom surprised me: we'd talked about food culture in the US vs Taiwan and I had brought up that I really like all the different things Taiwan does with peanuts. She made boiled peanuts with a chili and oyster dipping sauce. Delicious.
So anyhow, dinner is winding down. The rest of my girlfriend's family has finished and at this point it's just her mom, myself and the peanuts. Her mom stands up, pushes the bowl of peanuts in front of me, and said what I took to be:
你可以吃完吧？(nǐ kě yǐ chī wán ba?) You can finish these up, right
So I was like, of course I can! I'm happy to. Her mom smiled at me and left to go sit in the living room with the rest of the family.
Five or six minutes pass when my girlfriend enters the kitchen - I'd just been sitting there savoring the peanuts. (They were really good).
My girlfriend, seeing me, opens her eyes wide like saucers and says, what the hell are you doing! You're supposed to be washing dishes, but you're sitting here eating when we're all waiting on you to start the movie!
Now my eyes get big, looking between the stack of dishes in the sink and the nearly empty (large) bowl of peanuts in front of me.
It turns out that she actually had asked if I could 洗碗（xǐwǎn), do the dishes, not finish the peanuts.
Girlfriend helps me wash quickly, we go outside and everybody laughs at my goof. Her mom sighs and says, at least somebody likes my cooking. It wound up being too late (we were leaving very early the next day) so we didn't get to watch the movie.
Note: in Taiwan, the "ch" in chī fàn is often pronounced sort of like an "sh", but Taiwanese people don't really do the retroflex sounds, so the result is that (to my ears) the pinyin x and ch can sometimes be hard to distinguish. Especially given that she put food in front of me, so chī fàn made perfect sense.
TL;DR - thought girlfriend's mom asked me to 吃完(chī wán) after dinner, but she had really asked me to 洗碗（xǐwǎn), wash the dishes. Instead of washing the dishes I sat and ate a big bowl of boiled peanuts myself, like an ass, making everyone else wait on me to start a movie.
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