Another big food holiday has passed and I didn’t kill anybody. I am not talking about killing a drunken family member over a slander that started with the phrase, “You know what I really hate about you…..” No. I am talking about not killing anybody with my cooking.
Elna Nyfors, my grandmother, was a brilliant cook. She arrived in Canada with a grade two education and a work ethic that would make Protestants orgasmic. The only English word she knew was potato – and from that one ingredient she could produce an incredible seven course meal and a vodka chaser for dessert. Unfortunately, no other Nyfors gals inherited Elna’s cleverness in the kitchen. To be honest, the family has not eaten well since she died.
It comes as no surprise then that big food holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving have always been a source of stress in my family. To get around it, we have all become highly skilled at getting ourselves invited elsewhere. The tactics below have been very effective at snagging invites to dinners:
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We were thinking of doing Christmas dinner at Tim Horton’s…
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Our kitchen has a snake infestation…
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We’ve been so busy buying gifts for orphans, we totally forgot to buy food for ourselves…
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Our stove was stolen…
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We have all these free flats of booze…
On holidays when my family was not able to finagle an invite to someone else’s house, we have attempted to cook for ourselves. One year, my mom cooked a turkey for seven hours only to realize that the bottom oven element wasn’t working. The top of the turkey browned beautifully – the inside was salmonella pink. We had Chinese food that year….and every year thereafter, once we realized that we could get Chinese food delivered on major statutory holidays. Fung “Fred” Chen the delivery man for Happy Golden Panda Chinese Kitchen Express soon became a coveted member of the family.
When I moved out on my own, I soon came to realize that I had no sense of how long to cook food. My mom had huge worries over food safety and so she adapted recipes accordingly. The goal of cooking, as she understood it, was to kill as many germs as possible. Thus, she would cook chicken breasts for a minimum of three hours; peas and carrots needed to be cooked for one hour; and pork needed to be cooked for months. Essentially, I grew up on food that would be identified as either jerky or gruel by most people. For the longest time, I thought the difference between cooked vegetables and soup was negligible.
Recently, I made a vow to learn how to cook properly – and to stop bothering poor elderly Fred Chen to bring me chow mein for Thanksgiving. This year, I made a three course meal and it turned out well. Not Elna Nyfors great…but the dog liked it and no one died. In my cookbook, that is a huge success.
