4 hours Ago
Things that go wrong during the holidays just seem so much worse. There are scads of other things that can go sideways. Add company (relatives!) to the mix and the humiliation factor skyrockets.
Holiday cooking mishap stories are always funnier in retrospect. They become the ones we tell over and over again when we gather around the table. The worse the calamity, the better the story.
Holidays in our house often mean special cuts of meat. Fatty ones, the kind best cooked at high heat. We love prime rib and prime cuts of steak for special occasions.
Prime rib can splatter all over the oven. Then it smokes, too. Cue the smoke alarm.
We don’t have handy access to the gas grill in the winter so we sauté steaks indoors. To do them really well, the pan has to get screaming hot. Everything smokes.
It’s winter. We have to open windows and the kitchen gets freezing. We don’t always remember the smoke alarm, which means a mad dash — and the cats disappear under the beds.
Holiday mishaps are not limited to the actual cooking. There was the time my mother took the turkey out of the oven and dropped it onto the floor — and didn’t tell anyone until after Thanksgiving dinner. We always refer to that one as the turkey with the broken leg.
History repeated itself many years later when my brother, Ed, visited his fiancée in Schenectady. Michele’s mom was showing her how to make a turkey. On the way to the platter from the pan, Michele dropped it onto the floor.
“My mom said to pick it up and put it on the platter and serve it,” she remembers. She was horrified. Her mother said nobody had to know.
Until the next day, when they told Ed and her father. Would she do it today? “Yep!” Michele said. Sometimes appliances act up and holidays are the worst time for that to happen.
My friend Andrea was having the whole family over for Christmas dinner one year when the refrigerator stopped working on Christmas Eve. “It was only three years old,” she recalled. “And it was one of those warm Decembers.
” It was too warm to keep anything in the garage, so they collected coolers and her father bought all the ice he could find. Christmas dinner went off without a hitch. Early one Thanksgiving morning we got a frantic phone call from Mary.
She was hosting and her oven wasn’t working. Could she put the turkey in our oven? We were going to my mother’s for dinner. Mary returned when the turkey was done and did the best she could with the small convection oven over the stove.
We came home that evening to a wonderful-smelling house. Andrea had a similar problem two days before Thanksgiving one year. The thermocouple in her oven broke and “the repairman said he couldn’t come for two weeks,” she recalled.
She was frantic. Dad to the rescue again. He drove all over the Capital Region looking for a thermocouple and was able to install it.
Thanksgiving was saved. My extremely prepared and organized friend Dawn was getting 10 holiday pies ready to bake the day before Thanksgiving when the igniter in her oven stopped working. Her husband called every company he could think of to get the part.
He finally found one and got to the store before they closed. He was able to install it and the pies were saved. “Not only did I finish my pies but I cooked two turkeys for Thanksgiving,” reported Dawn.
“I have a second stove downstairs,” she confessed. Sometimes it’s the ingredients that don’t cooperate. Mary’s friend who loves escargot decided to make it from scratch.
Fresh snails need to be soaked in water overnight. One recipe recommends you cover the container with plastic wrap and punch holes in it. Her friend missed that part of the directions.
She put the snails into a pot of water on the stove and went to bed. Overnight, the snails liberated themselves. The next morning, there were snails all over the kitchen, even on the walls.
Undaunted, she gave it another try. This time she put the lid on the pot. When it was lifted the next morning, all the snails were clinging to it.
“You can buy snails in a can,” Mary told her friend. Sue decided to try brining a turkey one year. She bought a kit that included a large plastic bag, ingredients and instructions.
When she took the turkey out of the refrigerator the bag broke, spilling the liquid and poultry juices throughout the refrigerator and all over the floor. Before the turkey even went into the oven, everything had to be removed so the refrigerator could be completely cleaned and sanitized. And then the floor.
Needless to say, dinner was delayed and wine was necessary to cope, said Sue. Kathleen was seated at Christmas dinner waiting for her father-in-law to carve the turkey with his new electric knife. Everyone was watching with rapt attention, but the knife wouldn’t cut through the meat.
He was slowly mutilating the bird when he discovered he hadn’t taken the clear plastic cover off the knife. Oops. A different Mary’s in-laws have a long tradition of trying out new and unusual dishes for the holidays.
Deep-fried turkey (overcooked), lamb on the grill (practically raw), turducken (OK, but pretty weird). When her sister-in-law suggested a traditional turkey dinner it seemed tame, but manageable. They didn’t realize it was her first attempt at cooking a turkey.
The family was gathered around the table admiring the beautifully browned bird. The first cut showed the bird was definitely not cooked. After several trips back to the oven, they realized the bag containing the giblets and neck were still inside the cavity, frozen.
That one went down in history as the sushi-turkey. Holiday cooking misadventures are not limited to the meal. Both my niece Ann Marie and her mother-in-law each experienced similar misunderstandings with the cut-out gingerbread Christmas tree ornaments they’d made.
The cinnamon ornaments were made with applesauce. “Easy and aromatic,” Ann Marie recalled. They both had people snatch them off the tree and eat them.
“Not tasty,” she said. “But lessons were learned.” Carol makes fudge for Christmas gifts, but one year she used a half cup of butter instead of a half stick.
There may have been too much milk, too, because the fudge didn’t set. “There was no saving it,” she said, sadly. She had to throw it out.
I’ve made the half-cup/half-stick blunder myself. I was luckier, though, the time I forgot to add the sugar to my spritz cookies. The first pan came out of the oven and it was immediately obvious when I tried one.
Then I remembered I’d left out the sugar. All of it. I threw the rest of the dough back in the mixing bowl, added most of the sugar the recipe called for and whipped it up.
The next batch came out just fine. You’d never know the sugar was added later. This year’s Thanksgiving Day snowstorm wreaked havoc with Kaitlyn’s holiday meal in Ballston Spa.
She and her husband roasted one turkey and smoked another. The table was set for 11 with her Grandma’s good china, and the sides were in process when the power went out. After some tears they decided to move everything to her in-laws' house.
Turkeys and sides were packed up. On the way to his parents' house, her husband’s four-wheel-drive stopped working and the road was closed. Right about then, Kaitlyn called him to say the power had miraculously come back on.
He returned, they unloaded the food and Thanksgiving was saved. The holidays don’t always get saved, as we’ve all learned. But the ones that fail make the best stories.
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