World's Worst Cook

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.