Scratching the Surface of Kitchen Fails

Oh Lordy. Should I go way back to when I was first married (to my first husband) and start with a baked (canned) ham jumping out of the roasting pan and skidding across the kitchen floor while my husband’s boss and his wife sat in the living room eating Ritz crackers and Kraft cheese? I had to wash the ham in the sink to get all the floor grit off it. Dinner was agony waiting for his boss to notice a dust ball on his fork.

If it’s okay if I borrow my mother’s fail, how about making scalloped potatoes out of a box for your daughter and her new boyfriend (later to become her first husband) and baking a spoon in the potatoes, as in the guest dives in with a serving spoon and lifts out the mixing spoon. I never forgot it but he never mentioned it. Not ever.

Oh, there’s a lot of ground to cover here.

How about having a living room full of ten people waiting for Hanukkah latkes (potato pancakes) while, in the kitchen, the food processor suddenly decides it is only capable of pulverizing raw potatoes into a creamy soup rather than shredding them to be fried? Friends curled up on the sofa with pillows and blankets eating Hanukkah gelt until the late hours. The gold wrappers were everywhere.

Or the Thanksgiving turkey that cooked all afternoon in a not great oven and was taken beautiful and uncarved to the table because one son wanted to show off how Thanksgiving was done in his family to his Laotian girlfriend and the turkey being pretty raw when we cut into it so we had to hack it into pieces and microwave it lest everything else go cold. It was actually a metaphor for their relationship, but we didn’t know it then.

Or the slices of raw garlic placed atop homemade chopped liver on tiny toast rounds by my husband because he forgot to read the part about sauteing the garlic first. He was in a hurry. Our guests that night – a bunch of them, it was a big party – commented with phrases like “Oh my,” “That’s intense.,” smiling while they backed away from the table. Chopped liver itself is nothing for amateurs, with or without the garlic garnish. That he tried is what was so gallant and memorable.

Just getting started. This could be a series.

Tonight, after dinner, I’m going to make fifty cupcakes to put in lunches for homeless outreach tomorrow. That seems, if you don’t mind, in light of what I’ve been through, and all life has done to me and mine in the kitchen, well, that seems to me to be a piece of cake.

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Photo by Sheelah Brennan on Unsplash