Look Out Below!

So there I was…

Thanksgiving 2006, Dave wanted to impress my family with his kitchen skills. I lived in a one bedroom apartment with a small kitchen, did I even have a table to eat at? I don’t remember.

So lemme back up a bit. My mom always worked on Thanksgiving because of the great double pay her job offered. So, our family Always celebrated the weekend after Thanksgiving. It made it easier to spend time with all the families when we did it that way. So Dave gets the bright idea to cook a turkey at my apartment. He had a lot of bright ideas that day, and some well, not so bright.

You probably know someone like my hubby. He didn’t exactly go to culinary arts cooking school, but he watched a lot of Emeril and thought he pretty much knew everything there was to know because he learned it on the food channel. We will discuss his crush on Racheal Ray some other time.

So like I said, there we were cranking out the second turkey of the week, and this time in my 35 square foot kitchen. Being that he really wanted to make a good impression, he made every side imaginable. You name, it we had it. The only problem was I had a small stove and even smaller oven which barely fit the turkey so he was playing some food version of musical chairs and every ten minutes he’d take something out of the oven and pop in the toaster oven. Then pour something in a pot, then stuff something in the microwave and pop it back in the oven. To this day I don’t know how anything actually cooked.

Then came the big moment, the turkey was almost done, the gravy was boiling away on the stove and all the dishes were ready to go. We had enough food to feed an army. And anyone that knows Dave knows it had to be PERFECT! As my family is shuffling in and the holiday music is in full swing, Dave adds the finishing touches to the candied yams (sweet potatoes) and because there was no room at the inn, that baby went right in the toaster oven. Except, in the busyness of greeting everyone he hit the TOAST button instead of the toaster OVEN button. If you don’t own one of these gadgets lemme explain: when you use the toaster OVEN feature it heats from the bottom and everything inside gets radiant heat filling the appliance. BUT when you hit toast it cranks the top and the bottom to full blast, and within minutes we had a full blown, four alarm holiday emergency on our hands. Someone screamed smoke, another screamed FIRE!

The marshmallows on the top of that dish lit on fire like a S’mores gone wild party. Dave, being the quick thinker that he is, put on the oven mits as fast as he could and pulled the inferno out. Taking a deep breath while burning off both of his eyebrows, blew as hard as he could to put the flaming marsh-messiness out. The marshmallows were warm, goey even. And when he tried to blow it out he actually blew fiery pieces of marshmallow all over my kitchen. It was like a tiny medieval attack had hit my cabinets. He screamed, like a girl I might add, we all screamed (but we ARE girls.) He for some reason put the sweet potatoes back in the toaster oven, yanked the cord out of the wall and ran over to the window yelling “LOOK OUT BELOW!” He tossed the whole thing out the second story window…side dish, toaster oven and all.

You know that saying “you never get a second chance to make a first impression?” ya…that’s true. He basically, out of guilt and some sick inner desire like he has something to prove, cooks for all of our holiday dinners now. After 13 years, my family has complete faith in his cooking but I’m sure somewhere in the back of their minds they are secretly hoping this year is the year something catches on fire and goes flying out the window. I mean, what’s the holidays without a little excitement, am I right?

Share some of your holiday nightmare stories with me!

JB