I can’t really complain about Pepper Mill’s Easter Dinner – after all, she came up with something acceptable to our vegetarian daughter, compatible with her own condition (she’s in the middle of oral surgery), and tasty and traditional. Besides, I wasn’t putting it together. But she did make an interesting mistake that I have to bring up.
Some time ago, she discovered the joy of those fingerling mini-potatoes, and will produce some variation using them. for this one she decided to wash them well and season with, among other things, a spice mix she got from a local spice shop, run by an acquaintance. When I took a helping and bit into it, I found it fiery hot (in the spice sense) and pretty salty.
"What do you think? ’ she asked.
“Pretty salty,” I commented, not mentioning the hotness.
“Can’t be. I didn’t put any salt on them.”
“Yeah, they’re pretty salty, Mom,” commented our daughter, MilliCal.
Curious at our reaction, Pepper mill took a bite of potato. Her eyes went wide with shock, then with understanding.
“Oh my god! I used the wrong packet! This is the Ghost Pepper salt!”
I didn’t ask why we had a packet of Ghost Pepper Salt – we always have some unusual spices around. I decided to keep eating the potatoes. They WERE pretty salty, but the ghost pepper chile seasoning made it interesting. It was too hot for Pepper Mill and MilliCal. Our daughter had been coping by peeling off the toxic skins. Pepper Mill took the bowl and washed off the potatoes. The chili pepper seasoning hadn’t penetrated through the skins upon cooking, so it was safe – and pretty bland, in my opinion.
Pepper Mill decided she’d make this dish for our friends’ Hot Food Party next year.
This is second-hand, but I heard it from the perpetrator, and it was corroborated by her family:
Many years ago, our neighbor down the lane made a glazed ham for her family’s Easter dinner. Brown sugar, pineapple rings, cherries–the very picture of an old-fashioned glazed ham. It wasn’t until they started to carve it that she discovered why it had been unexpectedly difficult to push the toothpicks in to secure the garnishes.
The ham she had bought was sealed in a clear plastic wrap, and she had forgotten to remove it.
(On the plus side, her family insisted that it had been the juiciest ham ever, and tasted just fine once you pulled the plastic off and spooned the glaze over it.)
So when we went to pull the ham out of the oven for Easter dinner this year, the oven was worryingly cold. I looked up at the dial, and sure enough, it had been turned off at some unknown point in the past. After thinking a bit, I realized that the only possible answer was that I must have turned off everything after making the sauce for the scalloped potatoes, rather than just turning off the burner. We at Easter dinner after 8pm this year. :smack:
I was tasked with making three sweet potato pies for Thanksgiving one year. Everyone loved my pies the previous year and specifically requested I make them again.
So, I had a large bowl on the counter with most of my ingredients in it. I began cracking eggs into the bowl, and the very last egg I cracked was rotten. (The eggs were from a neighbor. One of the eggs must have gotten hidden under the straw for a few months.)
The egg smelled so bad I nearly puked. I had to take the bowl out into the woods and bury the contents. No pie that year.
My mom used to endure a lot of ribbing about her baking-soda biscuits* and her green scum stew; the latter was the impetus for an impromptu restaurant visit when I was a kid…
*Turns out your can’t substitute baking soda for baking powder after all.
That was my first ever (and last) rotten egg. Our small flock lay reliably in three stacked wine crates. The “bad egg” was from a friend/neighbor whose flock is out of control. Since that disaster, whenever she offers me a dozen I tell her we have plenty, thanks.
My MIL made a pie that called for a cup of apple cider for the filling. Her brain farted, and she added that much apple cider VINEGAR instead.
I wasn’t there, but I have a fond memory of the late Other Shoe telling the story, complete with his dad’s dramatically woeful lamentation. “Your mother. Made me. A. Vinegar. Piiiiiiieeeee.”
One Thanksgiving, my mom got it into her head that she was going to deep fry our turkey. My sister and I were tasked with getting it out of the deep fryer, so we took it outside in the event the oil spilled everywhere.
That was how we learned that turkeys can slide a remarkable distance once they’ve been deep fried, even on gravel. That damn thing shot out of the deep fryer like it was a slip n slide.
So, we looked around all furtively, scooped up the turkey, picked the gravel, twigs and dried grass out and popped it back in the deep fryer basket, fried it for another 5 minutes and brought it in to serve.
There was the year I lived in a volunteer community and my parents came for TDay. The other volunteers had gotten up early to make a turkey that had been donated. After a while they realized it was old, REALLY old, like the coupons on the wrapper were long-expired. Then it became a game of swap out the turkey without letting **gigi **and her parents realize.
My one housemate took the bad turkey and dumped it, roasting pan and all, into the alley next to the house. They took off in the car – “And I looked and Bunny was still wearing the oven mitts!” – and got some extra turkey from the residential program we worked with. They pulled it off – we had no idea till they spilled the whole story later that weekend.
There was the evening a friend and I were cooking hamburgers and sausages outdoors in the dead of winter. We were both so shit-faced drunk that it took at least half an hour for us to realize the propane tank had run empty partway through.
I don’t recall having any disasters of this magnitude, beyond making chiles rellenos with much hotter peppers than expected, but a friend of ours once invited us for a visit which led to some amusing events.
The wife had planned to bake a turkey to have ready when we drove in, but their oven died, so she had dismembered it and microwaved it in sections.
Being pretty handy, I offered to see if I could fix the oven. I found their toolkit to be entirely adequate for hanging a picture not exceeding a pound or so, but not for much more. She went with me to a neighbor to borrow the tools I needed.
What really amused me was how carefully she assured the neighbor that the tools would be used by me, and NOT her husband (who has the same first name). Apparently he was known to be not only not handy, but a danger to himself and others when using tools more complicated than a paint scraper. :eek:
As expected, the calrod element was burned out, we sent him with it to get a replacement, and all was well.
Our family has a record of disasters at Thanksgiving. One year, it was a power failure (the turkey got cooked at my mother’s house that year), then the oven crapped out (quick fix with a crimp connector), and then my wife cut herself slicing the turkey (trip to emergency room). Every year, we kind of hold our breath, hoping there’s no disaster in the offing.
