I am not a summer person. I love the IDEA of summer. Waking to birds chirping. Days at the beach. Ballgames. S’mores. Barbecues. Peach, strawberry and watermelon festivals. Hell, any festival at all! They’re all awesome. Dining outdoors at an umbrella table. Fruity, overpriced summer drinks.  

But the reality of summer? Not so much. Shirt clinging to your back as you race to work each day. Only four days at the beach, two of which rained. Summer nights on the deck, the soft whir of mosquitoes buzzing your head as they launch a strategic assault on your person. A sultry evening breeze– thick with honeysuckle and the string of obscenities my husband mutters as the charcoals refuse to light.

Grilling at our house is an adventure, testing not only skill, but endurance. Do you really have what it takes? The blinding, acrid smoke– once the coals finally catch. The drinking involved to get you that far. The orange glow of flames licking at the sirloin that would have been dinner– had it not fallen onto the coals. The scorched veggies that you attempted to grill after seeing it on a cooking show. Because… how hard could that be? The charred but loving offerings served up after admitting defeat once again. The loving family dialogue at the kitchen table– (because it’s too effing hot to eat outside after an hour spent lurched over a grill). “Mom, it’s overdone. Underdone. Insert complaint here.” The carcinogenic risks involved in eating the tortured results. The bloodshot eyes.   

The upside? Long after dinner is over . . . the burnt offerings digested (maybe) the grill is now an inferno. Those coals are runnin’ hot. We could grill a twenty pound turkey now. I could grill a week’s worth of dinners now. Which can only mean . . . it’s time for s’mores. One more sacrifice to the alter of the barbecue. Marshmallows on fire. To celebrate the end of another glorious summer.  

Why is it that some of the things we most want, we can never have?

A fall night I could be having meatloaf

In my case, it’s meatloaf. I’m the person in your party who orders the meatloaf when she finds it on the menu. One of the reasons for this is that I really like meatloaf. But the other reason is more tragic. It’s because my family does not allow me to make it anymore. Yes, friends– I’m on probation. For the tenth year.

My crime? Serving a meatloaf my girls claimed was inedible using harsh words like ‘disgusting’ or ‘eeeew’. I suffered silently through questions like ‘why does it ooze like that?’ Or ‘is it supposed to look like that, mom?’ Innocent as they sound . . . those questions drove a stake through my meatloaf confidence. Not even the Five Bucks For Five Bites rule (see previous post) worked when I served meatloaf. Yet, the bigger question is how can my recipe be so wrong? When everyone makes it differently? How has my recipe come to be so persecuted? 

So, now . . . a decade later, I am left with only the bitterness of loss. The ache of unfulfilled dreams. Reduced to ordering meatloaf in every diner, drive-in and dive I enter. My only consolation? The hope of future generations. Once my girls have kids? Just wait until I get to cook for the grandchildren…  Boohahahahaha.  

Thanksgiving: The Pressure Cooker of Holidays

Experts opine that Christmas is stressful. All the decorating. The wasted money buying useless stuff for your obligation list of people you don’t like and never see. Suicides rise, families with normally good relationships… fighting like monkeys slinging poo. But if you ask me, Thanksgiving is a compressed version of that. Focused solely on a meal.

But it’s THE meal. The granddaddy. The big pilgrim. Or maybe it just seems that way to me. For those of us who are cooking-challenged, Thanksgiving is our Everest— without a Sherpa guide. An adrenaline rush, sweat-on-your-brow marathon. It’s smoke-filled kitchens and alarms going off. And that’s just for my pumpkin bread.

The stint in hell commences at 7 am. ETA: 2 hours to the not to be missed Macy’s parade. Goal: Turkey in the oven– still full of promise in it’s dewy, solution-injected, naked glory. Too early in the day for it to be the smoldering ruin it may become. Pumpkin bread cooling on the rack, (along with the second string coffeecake in the event of pumpkin tragedy). The family ready to plop in front of the television for three glorious hours of channel surfing for the best parade angles. 

For a quarter century, my Thanksgivingpalooza goal of butt in chair by 9 am has worked. Until last year. For the cooking-challenged ( a recognized disability), multi-tasking becomes difficult. Great chefs remind me of chess players. They’re always three moves ahead. This is not me.

Last year, The turkey was in the oven by the aforementioned deadline. A little cocky, I leisurely sipped coffee as I prepped my pumpkin bread batter. Smug smile on my face, I did not recognize this arrogance as a premonition of doom. Bread in the oven by 8:15, I began humming (off-key) as I prepared the rest of breakfast, not knowing I had just set disaster in motion.   

By 8:45, aromatic spice of baking pumpkin drifting through the house, I was congratulating myself. After 25 years, I OWNED this. I was Martha Stewart’s sarcastic, inept second cousin. Until the smoke alarms started blaring. Bemused, I wander to the oven. Because what the hell could possibly be burning this early? 

Our turkey in better days.

Alas, I’d forgotten that on Thanksgiving morning only– I have to cram everything on the bottom rack of the oven. My beautiful pumpkin bread– on the top rack, had risen into the oven coil and had begun the ignition process. At T minus thirty seconds until inferno, arrogance had been replaced by lump-in-my-throat fear of actual fire. I jerked the pan from the coil. Of course, the incinerated part stuck to the coil, causing a wave of glorious pumpkin batter to slosh over the side of the pan . . . onto the turkey roasting below.

That year, my pumpkin bread looked as though someone had performed surgery midway through baking. By the parade’s first commercial break, our second-string coffeecake was called off the bench to enter play. But the best part of that day? After the smoke cleared (literally) and the smoke detectors quieted– later in the day when I removed the turkey from the oven, we discovered it blanketed with a crusty orange sweater. We found another large, toasted pumpkin crouton inside the bird. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen Pumpkin-Sweater Turkey on Top Chef. Feel free to try it yourself this year. Me? I think I’ll take a pass.