Holiday Disasters, anyone?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I thought I was batting 1.000. One of my responsibilities was setting up our big boat cooler with layers of ice and drinks for our xmas eve party.

I had an inoffensive lager for my sister’s husband, a session IPA for my nephews, alcoholic seltzer for the ladies, and some cutting edge sour beers (including a dill pickle beer) for me and my brother.

I got it all, right?!

Nope. Nothing for the three little kids in attendance. Tap water was the only nonalcoholic drink in the house. Sure, you could stir in some orange Metamucil but they aren’t into that.

2

When Mrs. Solost and I hosted our first Christmas dinner back in '01, I ran a bunch of potato peels through the garbage disposal. Not a good idea, as it turned out-- garbage disposals don’t do well with fibrous material like that. The pipe jammed up, and when we ran the dishwasher, the drained water, which shared the drain pipe with the kitchen sink, flooded the kitchen so badly it was running down through the floor into the basement.

In another flooding disaster last year, my sister, who’s turn it was to host Christmas dinner, had a second floor bathroom pipe break and it totally destroyed her appliances and ruined her kitchen, just a day or two before Christmas. Thousands of dollars worth of damage. Fortunately, her daughter / my niece and her husband, who had just bought their first house, loaned my sister their kitchen to cook the dinner.

So in our family we seem to have Christmas flooding disasters every 20 years or so.

3

I have a sister who roasted a duck one year and left the drippings in the oven to use later. After dessert, for some reason, brother-in-law decided to set the oven for its cleaning cycle – with the duck drippings still inside.

Flames ensued, followed by fire department, who – according to sis – blamed her for the mess.

4

We had a very small oven fire while Christmas dinner was almost done cooking (I hadn’t realized there was a little pool of apple pie goo on the floor of the oven), but we didn’t panic. Luckily, it was sunny and warm enough to open all the windows and doors and the smoke detector only beeped a few times before we got the air clear.

5

That would really piss me off. Did he do it accidentally???

6

This year we avoided disaster.

Last year at Christmas in a house with 7 little kids and 5 adults one of the bathrooms had a toilet supply line failure about halfway through cooking the big dinner. Which manifested as water beginning to flow out from under the kitchen cabinets and range. Of course the bathroom and kitchen shared a common wall. That was fun to clean up & dry off. Ref @solost’s flood, this one didn’t do much damage; that house was already in crappy shape and the incremental damage wasn’t obvious.


Here’s a “better” disaster:
That same year on Thanksgiving we’d brought the makings of a complete feast to the same house with all the little kids, intending to cook and serve there. Just got the turkey underway when one of the kids needed to go to the ER. For realsies, this wasn’t kidly nerves or overwrought parenting. Cue major flail to sort out how to parcel out the remaining kids, which of the 3 adults will do what, etc.

When the dust settles, it’s 10am and I’m alone in an empty house that’s not mine with a complete feast almost ready to cook, but with the countdown on indefinite delay. There’s not enough fridge space to keep all the ingredients properly cold until they return, and we’re facing a multi-hour bird roasting once we do have a firm kickoff time. Much juggling ensues.

In a house with no TV & no booze either.

Of course they keep telling me it’ll be another couple of hours, then another couple more hours, then … Until suddenly “We’re in the car”.

Cue another flail to get the bird going, etc. And once parents got back, to retrieve remaining kids, continue care for the ER kid, etc.

Our planned 2pm dinner was eaten at 9pm, when the little kids’ bedtime is normally 7-8pm and they’d had a difficult and disappointing day.

By the ends, the adults had had a Not Good Day. Memorable, but not Good.

7

Never mind, I see not that the BIL was married to the cook, your sister.

8

We had a string of a few years where we had at least one Thanksgiving dinner disaster, like me burning the pecans in the oven when trying to toast them for the stuffing and filling the kitchen with smoke, or my wife accidentally putting cinnamon in the gravy instead of black pepper. Or the one year my wife decided we should make mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes. (Shoeless’ Thanksgiving Dinner Rule #1: Do not wait until Thanksgiving Day to try something new! And especially without an actual recipe.)

It’s not an actual holiday (yet) but we often have bad things happen on Super Bowl Sunday.

9

Still is. I think that was the first holiday season in their new house.

10

My sister had an interesting xmas day. Her husband’s brother Andy invited his family (brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews) over for xmas. Andy is a nice guy, but he’s the most socially awkward person I’ve ever known. He lived with his parents until they died, despite their attempts at renting a house and setting him up in it. When his mom and dad died he just stayed in the house and gradually learned how to do laundry, etc.

So, on xmas afternoon everyone showed up. People assumed he’d cook some sort of very basic meal…expectations were low. Turns out expectations were way too high. He had invited everyone to come over, but had never mentioned food. He had a big bag of M&Ms. That was it, other than a few boxes of cereal and a carton of milk.

11

One Christmas at my Dad and Stepmothers house someone plugged the powder room toilet up but good just before dinner. I was tasked with plunging (why me?). No dice. Wretched excess is the only kind of excess for my Dad–“go get a five gallon bucket from the barn, fill it and pour it all at once into the toilet from head height. That’ll do it!”

Yup–that’ll crack the base, pop the toilet off the gasket, and leave me standing in shitty water in my socks. Fun.

12

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed. But I did. Loud and long!! And still giggling!!

13

It is funny 20 years later…!

14

I can think of two holiday “disasters” that occurred at my homes, but both pale in comparison to what has already been shared. Nevertheless…

The family was meeting up at my place for Thanksgiving. My parents had a turkey in their freezer they wanted to use, so they volunteered to donate it to the meal. They were making a 5-hour drive from their place to mine.

And forgot to bring the turkey.

So we sent my brother out to find a turkey on Thanksgiving afternoon. He did – only it weighed 24 pounds. Beggars can’t be choosers. At least it wasn’t frozen.

My Dad had heard about a method of cooking a turkey in record time by coating a brown paper bag in peanut oil, closing it up tight and then roasting at a high heat. 425F, if I recall correctly. By god, it worked! Dinner was in the evening, but we managed to juggle it all.

I was hosting a New Year’s Eve dinner for the family and as a first course, I had prepared individual raw beet root salads. They were dressed with balsamic vinegar, honey and olive oil, among other things. My stepmom was helping to distribute the salad plates, was distracted by talking with me and a little looped on the pre-dinner wine. She accidentally knocked one of the salad plates out of her hand, whereupon it did a lazy upside down turn to land in a red heap on my white carpet.

This girl got to work with soda water and blotting and managed to get all but a hint of it up. The professionals finished up after the holiday was done. Nothing left of the stain!

That carpet was still going strong when we sold the house several years later, I’m happy to say. But in the moment…

15

I don’t have any holiday disasters in the spirit of the thread, but I can’t help but think about these two things:

  1. We vacationed in Puerto Rico in Autumn 2016. Not a year later, it was wiped out by Hurricane Maria.
  2. We visited Pahoa on the Big Island of Hawaii in October 2017. Months later, the area – including the house we’d rented – were covered in lava.

We were wondering where we’d go the following year.

16

Yeah–that pre-dinner wine… A few years ago I was the cook and doing it right–deglaze the turkey pan with wine and then make a stock for gravy. Of course you have to remove the herbs and veggies after you’ve made the stock, which I did by pouring it through a sieve. Over the sink. With no bowl under it. Expletives were muttered. Gravy with store-bought stock is…ok.

17

Damn, I feel your pain! I’ve never done it, but I’ve come close. You sound like someone who values gravy like I do, and the loss of a good stock is painful. Sounds like a decent save, though. :slight_smile:

18

I think most experienced home cooks have carefully made stock or gravy then strained it right down the drain. I certainly have. That is a supremely dumb and helpless feeling when you recognize what just happened. Not a mistake you often repeat however.


I was sure the next sentence was going to tell us about the oil-fed oven fire and the nice guys with the big red trucks who saved most of your house. Glad to hear that particular disaster was averted.


Whichever hotel you can afford nearest to Mar a Lago?

19

I debated whether to say that, and decided not to. :wink:

20

Glad to absorb the potential modnote on your behalf.

Enuff about that topic.