I’ve had
the pleasure of telling this story in the Penn View Cookbook and again in my
column for Purpose. But I didn’t want my blog friends to miss hearing
about my incredible friend Kelly. Though
eager and well-intentioned, she is truly wretched in the kitchen.
Kelly is
arguably the world’s worst cook. Her meals have literally been inedible and
illness-producing. Entrees have been
mistaken for inanimate objects (like
rocks.) Thanksgiving Day 2004 was the pinnacle.
Pregnant
with her third child, she spent weeks watching Food Network, gathering recipes,
and dreaming about impressing her family. But on Wednesday evening she had not
yet begun to thaw her 15 pound turkey. She placed it in the refrigerator and
hoped for the best. On Thanksgiving morning, she put the bird in the oven with
optimism. Her mother-in-law arrived with mashed potatoes in hand. Kelly placed
these in the oven with the turkey and began mashing her very solid cranberries
for fresh sauce. She’d never been told cranberries need cooking before mashing…
Moving on to the fresh chestnut stuffing, she sent her husband out into the 40
degree rain and 40 mile per hour winds to grill squash. Under his umbrella, he
noted that the holiday wind was effectively and repeatedly extinguishing his
flame. When the poor man returned to the kitchen, Kelly asked him to retrieve
the blender so she could finish the sauce for the painstakingly grilled squash.
(It was at this critical juncture she discovered that boiling hot liquids
should not be processed in the blender.) The ensuing explosion resulted in noteworthy
burns to her husband’s arms. Not daunted, Kelly pressed on, pulling the turkey
from the oven and asking her father to carve. The inside of the bird was frozen
solid. She returned it to the oven and turned up the temperature (completely
forgetting about the potatoes…which soon ignited.) Poor abused husband bandaged (and smoke
billowing), our tenacious cook placed the few salvageable items on the table
for consumption. Kelly’s family reminisced about red can-shaped cranberry sauce
and boxed stuffing. The turkey never cooked completely. The guests attempted consolation
by attempting to eat the store-bought pumpkin pie, which Kelly imagined she
could not ruin. But lo and behold, instructions on the box detailed BAKING
prior to eating… Much much later, the starving revelers ate flaming hot pumpkin
pie straight from the oven.
You’ll be
relieved to know, Kelly no longer cooks Thanksgiving dinner. And for that, her family is thankful!
But in
reality, all of us need to be thankful we’ve got food of any kind on our tables.
We are a privileged people, with bellies full enough to let us laugh at errors
in cuisine. Would that our global family could experience the same.
