Great culinary disasters of our time

Posted by Barbara on December 9, 2024 in Blog, Christmas, Family, Food, Humour | 2 comments

What’s that? I hear you say, shrugging off the mere thought of anything you ever cooked or prepared going wrong. Well you are in the lucky camp; the rest of us mere mortals can think back to times when the great meal went wrong.  Christmas is possibly the most stressful time for this.  A dinner party for friends is one thing, but the pressure to produce ‘the perfect Christmas dinner’ is not something that is easy to shrug off.  This is particularly an issue when the usual guests on December 25^th are one’s family.

In the last few weeks I seem to have been bombarded with adverts, articles and messages all geared to producing that aforementioned mythical item.  Why is perfection required at this time anyway?  As long as the food is edible and relatively good to look at, can we not perhaps be content with this?  And whether it occurred at Christmas or not, I challenge damesnet readers to declare that their meals have always turned out perfectly. 

One of my culinary faux pas was when in the midst of cooking I mixed up the jar of couscous with the jar of bulgur wheat. I could not fathom how despite apparently fluffing up the individual grains remained rock hard.

My mother used to relate how they had a group of friends over to supper and drinks one Christmas Eve.  She had prepared most of the Christmas dinner and had a turkey ready to roast the following morning.  One of their friends, Chris, was a chef, and after several drinks he gave an onsite demonstration on how to debone a turkey.  The guests went home and my parents went to bed.  The next morning my mother was up bright and early, but joy quickly turned to despair as she took out of the fridge what should have been a splendid turkey but was just a flat pile of meat.  Chris had not remembered to stuff his masterpiece.  A distressed phone call brought him back to the house 10 minutes later to wreak his magic with the turkey.

The challenge does not stop at the actual dishes served up – what about the table preparation? I remember making what everyone agreed was a really good lunch to celebrate my daughter’s birthday with my immediate family as guests. I can’t remember her exact age, but it was during the teenage years.  At the time I had recently returned from Almaty in Kazakhstan where I had managed to bring together representatives from customs and law enforcement agencies from the 5 ‘stans’. I will leave the interested reader to check out the country names. Over three days we had run a conference addressing piracy and counterfeiting on behalf of the UN, the World Customs Organisation and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. 

My mother-in-law picked up one of the forks and sniffed disparagingly. ‘I think your silver needs a good clean,’ she said helpfully. Now what was that they used to say about counting to 10 before reacting? I am forever grateful to my sister-in-law, her daughter, who mildly pointed out that she believed I had been somewhat busy recently. Her timely intervention ensured GBH was not committed on that day.