Skidding Ham and Other Tales

Daily writing prompt

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

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I’ve had so many.

I could write about my canned ham (which I considered deluxe at the time) skidding across the kitchen floor while my still pretty new husband, a person used to his mother’s flawless cooking, sat in the living room of our upper flat in Flint chatting politely with his boss and his boss’s wife. I washed the ham. I had to.

Or I could write about moments seared (sorry) in my head because the cooking fail is forever connected to a parenting fail. Attempting to carve an underdone turkey with a dull knife. That sentence right there, fragment that it is, exemplifies the fraught road that was my parenting of teenagers.

But there have been so many cooking triumphs. Perfectly cooked, though sometimes very greasy, latkes for Hannukah, brisket to die for (except when I lost the brisket competition to my older daughter who used Martha Stewart’s recipe while I used Mama Leah’s Jewish Kitchen’s) and meatloaf which is different every time I make it but apparently has become a fond memory of all of my kids. In fact, we’re having a Meatloaf Madness night on Thursday.

With rivers of mashed potatoes. Always big fat thick pots of mashed potatoes with a ton of butter and some sour cream.

Failing is not all bad. It’s just a slice (sorry) of life. It’s all good in the end.

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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash