The year was 1964 and I was now a married woman for all of two months. My head was filled with grand ideas of elegant entertaining. Plus I had all these beautiful dinner plates and silverware we’d received as wedding gifts. I knew it was time to start using them.
I decided our first dinner guests should be my new husband’s parents. I’m not sure why I picked them, but I suspect I wanted to prove something. I had that, not uncommon, feeling they didn’t think I was good enough for their son. I would show them that he was perfectly fine in my capable hands.
I had my new Joy of Cooking cookbook, plus a collection of ten-cent Woman’s Day magazines and I felt perfectly capable of preparing a meal that would knock their socks off. Because my husband had just graduated from college and I had three semesters to go, our budget was tight. I was convinced, however, that I could pull off a “Gourmet on a Budget” meal.
My entree was meatloaf, but not your everyday type meatloaf. Oh no, mine would be shaped like a giant domed stadium and be filled with other ground meats besides hamburger. I would not use crumbled saltine crackers as my mother did, nor oatmeal as most recipes suggested. It would be gourmet bread crumbs for my meatloaf. I believe I also added cheese.
The rest of the menu is a little hazy in my memory. I’m sure I served some form of potatoes since my husband and his dad were big meat-and-potato guys. And I would have served a green vegetable. I’m sure of that. I know I served a jello salad as the 1960’s were the heyday for all sorts of fancy jello salads. I already had a stack of well-used jello recipes.
When they arrived at our furnished apartment we had donned our most elegant manners. We were now grown ups, having our first dinner party. We were going places in this world! I’m sure we served some sort of drink (iced tea) and hors d’oeuvres (probably potato chips and a dip made from sour cream and a package of onion soup mix).
It took me years to perfect the art of timing a meal so everything was ready at the same time. This meal was step one in the need to learn how to time a meal. Eventually every item on my menu looked done. In fact, the meatloaf was nice and crispy on the outside.
We gathered around our little kitchen table. I carried that dome-like meatloaf to the table the way you see people presenting a turkey at Thanksgiving. The meal looked good enough to be on a page in my Woman’s Day magazine.
We passed around the dishes family style. My husband cut the meatloaf and gave each of us a piece. It was awful. It was crispy-hard on the outside and almost raw in the center. The pieces of onion and mushroom I’d added were huge and hard. The bread crumbs were doughy and tasted like paste. There are no other words to describe my meatloaf than awful.
How did my in-laws react? Like troopers. No one said a word. My father-in-law woofed it down along with my husband. My mother-in-law, who by-the-way was one of the best cooks ever, gingerly picked at the parts of the meatloaf that were actually cooked.
I learned a few things from that disaster: cut or dice onions and mushrooms into very small pieces; and I learned the difference between dried bread crumbs and fresh. I worked for a long time on making the perfect meatloaf. After forty-four years I think I’ve got it down pat. It’s now my husband’s most requested entree for an everyday meal.
At that first dinner party everybody raved about my jello salad. In fact, it became my job to bring the jello salad to every big family dinner for about four years. It’s too bad they’ve gone out of style because I became an expert at jello salads.
I bet you’re wondering what we had for desert. I made cake! Betty Crocker had just come out with her cake mixes and I became really good at those too. Jello salads and cake mixes. I was some gourmet cook.
I originally posted this on my blog, Joyfully Retired
Everyone has a holiday meal disaster story! What’s yours?
How funny....i only very recently (within last week) read the coconut oil articles on the web. (100 uses, 80 uses etc.) so i bouht some and ordered some from amazon. (Im a stockpiler.)
Have started trying some of the uses. I tried using it a
If your going to be financially secure enough to venture out and see whats available in the B & B field...take your time and check it out. If you have to jump into a job..just to have one..you will not be happy. Hope you get the time to find wh
Love cooking memories. My dad was a chef and we all learned to cook from an early age (2 girls, 3 boys). I remember my first chocolate cupcakes bubbling over before ever getting to the oven (too much baking powder), a dozen egg yolks frying on top of the hot mixture for a lemon meringue pie and having to dump it all and start over. My 6-yr old brother trying to flip an egg like dad as we all watched it slide over and into the gas flames of the stove. Buying my sister a crepe pan and all of us spending a Saturday, creping everything, eating fresh yeast rolls fresh from the oven dripping with butter (Daddy always made a triple batch so some would make it to dinner)…
We were military and moved alot. To this day I can tell you nothing about my bedrooms, or living rooms, but I remember every single kitchen we ever had. Today we still gather at Mom’s, mine, Barbara’s or one of the boy’s homes, and more often than not we all end up in the kitchen.
Although I had learned to cook at my mothers knee, I was more inventive than she and when I married and became a vegitarian, I decided to try all sorts of veggie faire! One thanksgiving deciding to give in to everyones requests for a traditional dinner I purchased what the box claimed was a delicious turkey flavored soy product, it was worse than chewing an eraser, it even squeeked when you chewed it, fortunately the rest of the meal was a hit and the family had more than enough to eat, but i will never forget my son’s friend chewing away at the soy turkey and saying at least he was getting his excersize for the day! Thank God for great pecan pies!
Well my cooking disaster turned out to become a family tradition.
I have 4 sons and when they were all quite young (before any hit teen-hood) we were going through some tough times. Their father was refusing to work and of course this was causing quite a hardship on the family. We were on the verge of being kicked out of the house we rented. But somehow (it might have been through the kindness of others I don’t remember) we had the turkey we needed to make a Thanksgiving dinner. I had put the ‘bird’ in the fridge to thaw a day or two ahead of time and we were scheduled to go to my sister’s house for the big dinner. Our only contribution was going to be the turkey.
The evening before Thanksgiving I baking a casserole for the families’ dinner when the oven/stove quit working, I ran down to the basement hoping it was just a flipped breaker switch. Sure enough the switch was flipped to the off position. But as soon as I turned a unit of the stove on it would flip the switch again sending the whole house into darkness. When my ex stomped into the kitchen to complain that he couldn’t listen to his tapes I gave up on the dinner and put it in a glass dish so I could cook it in the microwave.
Our dinner conversation went something like this…
Me: “Chuck will you call the Landlord to see if he can come in the morning and see if the oven can be fixed”
Chuck (my EX): “NO!”
Me: “why not? I need to get this turkey cooked”
Chuck: “Because when he came over the other day to rag on my about getting the rent to him, he said I need to have the rent when he got back into town after Thanksgiving, the jerk.”
Me: “So you’re telling me he left town for the holidays?”
Chuck: “Yea I guess that’s what I’m saying! ! “ stomps out of the dining room and slams the bedroom door.
By the time dinner was over and the dust had settled it was almost 10p.m. and it hit me. WHAT was I going to do to cook the turkey? How could I cook it? Could I cut it into four pieces, so I could cook it in the small microwave? Panic set in and I couldn’t go to bed until I had found a way. LOL My EX went to bed and slept just fine. About 1 a.m. I hit upon a plan. I would cook it in the old Kamado style grill my mother had given us when she moved out of state. So at 1:30 a.m. I went out (we lived in Utah at the time) to uncover the grill from its blanket of snow. I found the small amount of charcoal we had left from the summer and then gathered the pile of small limbs I had cleaned from the yard that fall to break up for more fuel.
I had NEVER cooked anything but hamburgers and hot dogs on a grill and had no idea of the time I would need to take to cook a turkey. So I started in then. Thank goodness we had gotten a disposable aluminum pan for the turkey because I was able to reshape it good enough that it would fit the round grill. In went my turkey at about 2:30a.m. and stayed up all night stoking the ‘fire’ in the grill. I didn’t have a clue of rather it would work out or not but I was determined to get that bird cooked somehow.
Bleary eyed, existed from no sleep and the raw emotions I opened the grill the next morning to find a turkey that looked very strange to me. The ‘ popper’ had popped up to tell me it was done inside but there was also a blackened skin covering the bird. My eyes wet with tears I took the poor thing into the kitchen and looked at it closely to see what, if anything could be salvaged. In the glairing florescent light of the kitchen I realized that the black was only a thin layer of ‘soot’ and I wiped it off with paper towels.
That ‘poor bird’ turned out to be the best turkey I had ever made. Moist, tender, & smoky…it was wonderful. For years after that, until the boys were grown and out of the house, when we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner WE brought the turkey.
As I write this I am wishing that I had another Kamado grill so I could smoke our turkey this year.
HAVE A GREAT THANKSGIVING EVERYONE.
Wow! That is the neatest story. Did the landlord finally fix the electrical problem. That is pretty creative. Good job, I would have never thought of that.
Yes the landlord did fix the problems when he came home from a week long holiday…LOL
The year was 1975. I was 24 years old, madly in love with my boyfriend, Charlie. We were living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in an adorable little cottage at the foot of the mountains…my very first holidays away from home. Charlie was a graduate student, so my income from working at the local newspaper was our main one. Needless to say, we were pretty broke and holiday meals really stretched our budget to the max. Thanksgiving that year was a huge success because my dear mother sent me an 8-page, handwritten letter titled “Kathy & Charlie’s First Thanksgiving,” where she wrote in great detail the ingredients and prep for a turkey dinner, including homemade stuffing and cranberry jelly. I’ve used that letter as a guide every Thanksgiving since, and have copied it for my daughter to use, as well.
However, my next attempt at cooking something special didn’t go as well. My mom always baked the same birthday cake for all of her 4 children, a delicious “from scratch” marble cake with buttercream frosting. So, when my birthday came around that year (a week before Christmas Eve), I wanted nothing but our traditional marble cake. Mom volunteered to bake one and mail it all the way to Colorado, but instead I decided to make my own.
Armed with another letter from Mom, detailing all the ingredients and preparation, I set about making my first birthday cake. The ingredients and cake pan took all the extra money we had, but I just knew it would be worth it when I took my first bite of that delicious cake…my little taste of home at a time when I was very homesick. Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account the altitude change in Colorado, and my cake collapsed the minute I took it out of the oven! Sobbing hysterically, I called my mom and told her the devastating news: “my birthday cake is ruined, and we can’t afford to make another one!”
Three days later, the UPS man delivered a beautifully decorated marble cake with buttercream frosting, lovingly baked and shipped all the way to Colorado, from my loving mother. The best birthday present ever!!!
Mom told me WHEN to buy the turkey: “On the evening of the Monday before Thanksgiving Kathy & Charlie piled into the van to go shopping for the big day.” She told me WHAT to buy: “…the turkey, a vegetable, fresh cranberries, onions, sage, celery, …plus whatever other goodies they might see at the store.” She told me HOW to prepare everything, down to the last detail: “The big day dawned bright, clear and cold, with the sun shining on the snow-capped mountains. Early in the morning (at least by 10:00 o’clock) they took the bird out of the refrigerator…and rinsed it inside and out under cold running water. Then, they poured about 2 quarts of boiling water into the cavity of the turkey…sure smelled awful – like wet dog – but it soon went away. Holding it by its legs, as if diapering a baby, they spooned stuffing inside the cavity…” And she ended her letter this way: “And so, their stomachs full to bursting, they took an Alka Seltzer apiece and told each other it was absolutely the best turkey they’d ever tasted, and wasn’t the dressing delicious!”
I’ve
Well, when I was editing my response, some of the paragraphs got transposed. Didn’t mean to include all the info about Thanksgiving, but enjoy it anyway – it contains excerpts from my mom’s letter detailing how to prepare my very first Thanksgiving dinner.!
I don’t really have any hoilday meal disater stories, but I have more than my share of food disater stories. They have lovely and very distinctly memorable titles, Boiling Brownies, Black Mystery Fish, Citrus Salmon, then there is the one where I decited to stuff the cavity of a roasting chicken with not just a sausage stuffing, but rather with three Itallian sasuages. Seems I’d forgotten that when you cook sasuages they tend to swell up.
The landord showed up just as the chicken was comming out of the oven. It looked like a bird with three male members trying to escape. There were several people watching as I took it out of the oven and removed the foil. Gales of laughter erupted and I think I turned several different shades of red at that point. The look on the landlords face was priceless. It still makes me laugh when I think about it.
It was the Saturday after Thkgvg, and a dozen or more relatives were just showing up as I turned the oven on to pre-heat. Moments later, a strange sound and glow coming from the oven drew our attention: the electric heating element was shorting out! Sparks began flying from one end and progressed along its length like a fuse burning brightly. I managed to turn the appliance off and unplug it, but now it was the Big Day and I had no oven! I phoned a neighboring girlfriend and she put our bird into her oven for the morning. I had an electric roaster oven as back-up for other dishes. We would do what we could on the stove top, which had not been affected.
I phoned the locally-owned appliance store where the owner knew everybody and everyone knew him. They had sold me the oven five years earlier. Left a dramatic message on their voicemail and proceeded to make Thanksgiving happen as normally as possible. Just as we were about to cut the pumpkin pie, Dan the Appliance Man rang our front doorbell. He was holding a heating element in his hand and looked terribly apologetic. “I forgot to check the answering machine this morning!” he blurted out. “But here is the solution to your problem!” Within minutes my brothers-in-law had swapped out the elements, and I don’t believe I ever got a bill from Dan.
Would love to have your (current) meatloaf recipe!
In 1976 my sister and I decided we would have Thanksgiving together. We were both newlyweds and had as much experience in cooking as we did about other “grown up” things. My husband and I arrived at my sister’s home early to help get things ready. My sister had gotten up at 5am to put the turkey in the oven because that’s what’s what time Mom always got up. Dinner was scheduled for 1pm. At 10am, we put the potatoes on to boil. I don’t know why we thought we had to cook them for 3 hours but what can I say? The peas went on the stove at 11am, the rolls at 11:30. My sister and I busied ourselves in the kitchen making salads and kool-aid while the husbands sat in the front room watching football. Did you know that water boils out of pans if not watched closely? The potatoes turned in to a huge black burned up lump as did the peas. Neither pan could be salvaged so the whole kit and kaboodle went in the trash. We reasoned that we’d still have enough food with the salads, dressing, and turkey. By noon, we were wondering why the turkey didn’t smell like our Mom’s turkey. My sister opened the oven door to check on the bird when the oven door fell right off. “Oh! Be careful! That’s gotta be hot!” Nope….the oven wasn’t hot….it wasn’t even warm. She had forgotten to turn on the oven! We pieced on the salads and drank kool-aid all day. At 6pm we pulled the turkey out to see why it STILL wasn’t done. That’s when we discovered that we should’ve taken the the bag of “turkey parts” out of the cavity before stuffing it with dressing. That might also have explained why not all the dressing fit in to the bird….but who knows for sure? Suffice it to say after 35 years, we’ve gotten the turkey cooking down to a science and although we have families of our own and no longer share Thanksgiving, we laugh together about that our first Thanksgiving. That’s one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories even to this day.
…this is the best story yet! Sisters are worth their weight in gold – thanks for sharing.
My Thanksgiving holiday disaster happened when I was still single. I had invited friends, a married couple, to dinner at my apartment. I would prepare the turkey and the side dishes. They would bring the dessert.
Everything had gone so smoothly. I had finished all my prep. and was ahead of schedule. While waiting for them to arrive, I really had nothing to do so I thought I might as well clean up the kitchen, including washing was passed for my chef’s knife.
All of a sudden I saw a spurt of red fly across the cupboard in front of me. What’s that, I wondered? It took a minute before I looked down and realized it had come from my finger! There was so much blood, I was sure I had probably cut part of it off. I covered it up, just couldn’t bear to look. Finally, I looked at it, and while I had a very deep cut, at least it was still attached.
I should have gone to ER and had stitches, but I didn’t want to leave the turkey – not to mention my friends. They arrived and we had our dinner, but the blood from my finger kept oozing through the bandage onto my food throughout the meal. Not the most appetizing dinner I’ver ever hosted!
The good news? I don’t have to cook this Thanksgiving! Happy holidays, Everyone!
I am loving these cooking stories and memories! Thanks for sharing!
Mine was a minor embarrassment, simply because I am blessed with in-laws who have a sense of humor. The first year I served Christmas dinner to them, I roasted a turkey and my husband’s mother opined that she’d been looking forward to ham. I’m not a ham fan because it often seems too salty, but the next year I found a recipe that looked really pretty. It called for fresh ham and required a fairly long cooking time. But, it was not until I pulled it out of the oven that I somehow realized that I hadn’t had a clue what a fresh ham was. I’d just baked a fully cooked ham for about 5 or 6 hours.
In my first post-divorce Thanksgiving, there was a rather sad pall over the usually happy event. My new house was small and in need of renovation. But my kids were home and much-loved cousins had joined us. I dislike peeling quantities of potatoes so, since everyone wanted to help, I suggested that each guest peel two or three potatoes. One by one they took their turn, running the peelings down into the disposal. Suddenly, depite the disposal’s grinding, the drain was blocked. All the men in the house tried every solution–the metal snake, opening the pipes, etc.–but eventually Roto-Rooter had to be called to save the day. But the turkey was great and the ”disaster” became a family legend.
Of course today, we would compost those peelings!
Happy Thanksgiving to VN readers!