When things go terribly wrong.

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This post is for all of you who had a thing or two go wrong with your holiday meal. As I write this it is Christmas Day, and I still can’t wrap my head around the disaster that was yesterday’s meal. This meal had been planned weeks in advance. The house looked beautiful and glowed with the soft warmth of fairy lights twinkling in five trees of various sizes. Christmas music was playing in the background, a fire crackled in the fireplace; everything was picture perfect…or so it seemed.

Quite early the day went to hell in a hand-basket. I had brined my turkey breast (I won’t even go into the difficulty of that considering the pipe to my pot filler had frozen because our high temperature was 5°F) the day before. When I got up Christmas Eve morning (at the butt crack of dawn) I removed the turkey breast from the brine, rinsed it and patted it dry, rubbed it with herbs, lined my 6-quart slow cooker with celery, onion, and baby carrots, and slowly lowered the turkey breast in. I filled the cavity with aromatics and turned it on High setting, setting a kitchen timer for an hour, at which point I would lower the setting to Low, and let it simmer, filling the house with the scent of turkey goodness for the next six hours. At this point, quite pleased with myself, I pressed on with my frantic day.

When the timer went off an hour later, I set it to Low, and continued on. An hour hence, when my nostrils weren’t being tickled by luscious turkey aroma, I peeked through the glass lid of the slow cooker. Huh. Nothing looked different. I took the lid off and my turkey was still cold. My expensive slow cooker, purchased a mere 13 months prior, had given up the ghost.

I got in touch with number two son, Andrew (the child who once, on the morning of Thanksgiving, pummeled a turkey breast that had not thawed after three days in the refrigerator – apparently when I shoved the behemoth into the refrigerator, I moved the temperature up to the “North Pole” setting, and it remained frozen all the while I thought it was thawing nicely, but that’s another story), and we jointly decided that it was far too dodgy to cook that turkey via another method after it had been, essentially, sitting at room temperature for two hours. So out went the crockpot, turkey and all (with a mighty crash into the trashcan), out came the old back up crockpot that I’ve had for decades into which I shoved a roast beef.

While my old reliable (read: cheap) slow cooker chugged along, I decided to serve a house cocktail that I had prepped that morning and sampled perhaps a bit too much. When asked about it (it, at least, was a success), I replied that it was called Rudolph’s Gay Spritzer…errr, Rudolph’s Spritzy Titzer. I mean, Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer! Yeah.

As we opened gifts and chatted, hoping beyond hope that the beef would be juicy and tender, it wasn’t. Because of all of the goings-on earlier that day, there just wasn’t enough time to thoroughly cook the beef to succulent goodness and we ended up with beef-tasting shoe leather that my son and daughter-in-law (God love them) ate, commenting on its “good flavor” (and doesn’t that just say everything — similar to when you describe someone as having “a good personality”), as well as the accompanying sides that were all designed to be served with turkey — mashed potatoes, dressing, corn pudding, green beans, cranberry salad, and rolls. Because I’d kept giving the beef more time, the side dishes over cooked. The bread in the dressing had turned to sawdust; the corn pudding was mistaken for cornbread. The Rhodes rolls that I had taken out of the freezer and put onto the counter at 6:30 AM had still not risen by 3 PM, but out of pure orneriness, I baked them anyway. We needed an electric knife to cut them open. Fortunately, the pie was a success. I had bought it.

So, if you’re ever having difficulty preparing a meal, I want you to remember this post. It happens to the best of us. The meal may not have been enjoyable, but I guarantee you this is one Christmas Eve dinner we will never forget!

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