Well , I may be a couple of days late for Halloween but I saw an interesting article on the Ivillage series of discussion forums that got me to thinking about kitchen horror stories. The article on Ivillage was “6 Kitchen Horror Stories” http://food.ivillage.com/holiday/halloween/1,,g3jghcxq,00.html
and is fun reading and something can be learned from all of them but they are from the viewpoint of the professional chef.
My horror story is a little more simplistic, I think funny and far more day to day. When my ex-wife first married I found out that what she made best for dinner was reservations. She had come from a home where home cooked meals meant simply opening a can and warming something up was the norm. I had come from a home where both parents worked and my Mom, bless her heart was no “June Cleaver”. When the subject of the kitchen came up she would turn to my Dad and ask…now the kitchen? Is that where the refrigerator is? So needless to say my cooking education was somewhat limited too so putting both my wife and my experiences together to provide our first home cooked meal meant calling my Grandmother for advice. Like most young couples we were anxious to have another young couple as friends and invited the now famous Mike (Crash and Burn) and Dianne Hennecy over as our first guests. I called my grandmother and asked what could we fix and she said fried chicken would be the easiest along with mashed potatoes and gravy and a vegetable. I carefully took down all the recipe instructions, after it had become all to obvious that I couldn’t talk her into coming over to cook it for us, and we embarked on our first meal. It went something like this:
1. Flour , salt and pepper in a paper bag, soak chicken pieces in butter milk, heat cooking oil (Crisco back in those days) in skillet, flour the chicken by shaking it in the bag and fry it til golden brown in the oil. No time was mentioned so we dutifully fried the chicken for about 5 minutes, it looked beautiful but when we bit into it at the table, of course, it was raw and cold inside. Well maybe the gravy and mashed potatoes would be enough.
2. To make the gravy my grandmother had said to take the balance of the flour in the paper bag and use it to dry up the cooking oil in the skillet, brown it add the butter milk from soaking the chicken and Voila! Gravy. Well we had a skillet full of oil. When we poured the flour in there wasn’t enough to dry it up so we just kept adding flour. Honestly as the flour began to grow there was never a point where we had time nor room enough to add the buttermilk, the gravy was taking on a life of its own. You could turn the skillet upside down and the gravy would not come out and actually looked more like really nasty bread. So maybe we will just have buttered mashed potatoes? By now my wife was in tears.
3. Mashed potatoes, easy, peel , dice, boil and mash. How long to boil them? Well we never found out because while playing with the gravy we let the water boil out of the potatoes and when we tried mashing the ones that weren’t burned to the bottom of the pan, we found that you can’t easily mash nearly raw potatoes. Well we still had bread (store bought) we would serve with butter for lack of gravy (actually there was plenty of gravy it just didn’t look like gravy), the yet to discover raw chicken and a vegetable (from a can) my wife’s mother’s contribution to the dinner.
We tried to make the best of it by setting a pretty table with all of the china, crystal and silver we had received for wedding presents but no amount of fancy table ware can make raw chicken, raw mashed potatoes and canned vegetables into a wonderful meal . We ate out, my wife spent the whole night crying, which became a typical thing for her to do, and 42 years later Mike and Dianne are still my best friends and the wife is long gone and probably still cant cook any better than she did that night. I’m a little better at it but only because I watched a lot of cooking shows on PBS.
So read the article on Ivillage, be reminded and maybe share with us one of your own kitchen horror stories.
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