With Thanksgiving just 2 days away, I got to thinking about some disasters that I’ver created in the kitchen.
The favorite is the story we tell every year about how I managed to cause a ham to have green and red stripes on the inside, so that they were only visible when the ham was sliced. How did I manage this feat?
Well, Mom had just gotten out of the hospital and was not up to cooking that year, so I told her that I’d do it. I thought we needed to decorate the ham like they show in all the magazines with the pineapple slices, cloves, and cherries. So, I proceeded to decorate BEFORE I cooked the ham. The problem was that the pineapple kept sliding off. Using my enormous power of creative thinking, I decided to use toothpicks.
I felt really smart until I realized that the green and red dyed party toothpicks caused the ham to have stripes where the food dye leached through the meat. As it cooked, it went all the way through and the color kept getting stronger. It was
diseased looking, but tasted delicious!
The second one was when my tiny toy poodle managed to jump from the floor, and get high enough to get her teeth into the turkey cooling on the cabinet. We were in another room and heard, kathump-thump, kathump-thump, as she took off and landed while jumping. This was normal, so we didn’t pay any attention until we heard, kathump—-. The turkey weighed so much more than her that she was suspended by her teeth hanging off of the butt end of the turkey. We cut that part off and still ate it.
So, what culinary disasters have you had? Not just at thanksgiving, but at any time.