Charlie

I like to pretend I’m some kind of food guru, but the truth is, a year and a half ago, I was trying to no avail to get my mother to give me a recipe for lasagna so I wouldn’t starve while living on my own. Now, I finally have quite a few “recipes” of my own that cannot be taught (“Add paprika ’til it turns pink.” “Add salt until it tastes right.”) However, this still doesn’t make me a pro, which leads me to Christmas dinner in Toronto, and Charlie. This December, before we all headed off to our various corners of the world, we decided to throw a Christmas party. Let me rephrase that; my friend Mel decided to throw a Christmas party. One glitch. She didn’t really know how to cook. She’d seen her mother cook a bunch of times, but in the end, I agreed to help with the cooking so long as I didn’t have to do any dishes.

We hit the supermarket and, after a lot of math trying to figure out how many pounds to a kilogram, we bought the turkey, named him Charlie, and took him home with us.

Looks good now. What you didn’t see was Mel squealing as I had to pull the gizzards out, the turkey fat that spilled all over the counter as we tried to carve it, and the disaster that was the Pillsbury crescents.

As anyone who’s made crescents before can probably tell, I rolled them the wrong way. We also burned the first pan while we were trying to carve Charlie into the neat little plate of turkey he became. So much for having one part of the meal that was easy.

At least the mashed potatoes went off without a hitch, as did the stuffed mushrooms, which were my personal favorite and disappeared before I could get a picture.

However, by the end of it all, we were too tired to make dessert, so we threw a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven and ate it without whipped cream, which we had been planning to whip by hand. My fondue party a few days ago fared much better, but this is not the worst first party horror story I’ve ever heard. Except, of course, that while my friends were doing dishes, they saw the neck in a pot that had once held gravy, and refused to ever eat my food again.