All right, the appetizer is out, beverages are ready,
guests are arriving for our supposedly lovely dinner party. We’ve done our best
to remove the powerful cat smell and we are actually dressed and ready – although
I’m not quite sure how we did that.
Our guests, our friends, co-workers are all sitting around
chatting and trying to enjoy the clam dip but not really. The dip was more soup
than colloidal. The dip dripped off the crackers on to the rug and lovely clothes.
Instead of using a carrot or chip to scoup it up, you needed a spoon. It became
utterly unusable. Sigh. . .
Not to worry, they’ll surely forget about this dippy
disaster, after the wonderful meal I prepared. I slip back into the kitchen to
check on things. I had put the rice on 10 minutes ago. It takes 20 minutes for
this wild rice to cook and there beside the pot was the ‘wild’ part of the
rice, which takes the longest to cook! How could I have forgotten that? I toss
it in anyway, hoping that somehow it will cook extra fast.
Then, I peak at the Beef Stroganoff: oh my God what has
happened to this main dish? It smells divine but it looks like mush! It is not
recognizable as stroganoff. It looks like the sour cream, instead of making
this creamy sauce actually curdled in the pot. I’m now out of options.
I return to mingle. 15 minutes later I slip back into the
kitchen and prepare to serve. Everyone is seated. I’m using my best china. Troy
is so proud of me. Little does he know that, well, this will be a memorable
dinner but not like we had hoped.
We all begin to eat. The broccoli is actually a gorgeous
green and is delicious with the lemon butter, but I left probably too much of
the stem on because the Executive Officer’s wife informs me that she only eats
‘florets’, not the tough stem. I’m mortified.
The Engineer looks at the mess that is the stroganoff on his
plate and sighs and says that he’s just sure that this will taste good no
matter how it looks.
Troy bites into semi-crunchy rice and tries to put on
a non-embarrassed face, but he’s a mariner, not an actor and he looks
absolutely baffled as to why his brain tells him that rice should be soft but
his teeth are crunching on something.
The rolls were okay, not burned, not undercooked. But you can’t
hang a meal on rolls.
That’s it: the main course is finally over! Hopefully I’ll
wow them with my super delicious lemon meringue pie. So I clear the plates and
head to the kitchen to begin the dessert part of the meal.
I opened the refrigerator to pull the pie out and there it
is, the final, friggen disaster! I don’t make this pie often. I thought it
would be delicious cold. I had no idea that when you put lemon meringue pie in
the fridge, that really bad things happen. My once glorious, golden singed meringue
is now deflated and has separated from the lemon pie filling and the entire
filling has separated from the now semi-soggy homemade pie shell.
I took it out and sat it on the counter and just stared at
it.
And then I started to laugh. I’m just sure that since this
is the last visual food disaster, the evening cannot get any worse, so might as well find some humor in the whole
evening.
So, I make a very big deal out of showing them the pie and
how bad it looks. I have to serve the pie in bowls instead of dessert plates
because it is now pure lemony-meringuey mush. The navigator assures me that
even though this pie looks like a train wreck, he’s just sure it will be
delicious. And it was wonderful. I got the taste right but not the structure.
And everyone else starts to laugh too. Then I share with
them the chain of disasters of the entire evening starting with the cat. It
helps them to understand why our place was so cold when they arrived.
I have had probably thousands of dinner parties in a joint
20-year career with my husband and in the 20 years since we retired, but I
don’t remember any of them. This is my most memorable dinner event because of
the disaster cascade.
I learned so much from that night. Sometimes adversity is
the very best teacher, even when we are struggling with it at the time.
Hopefully we can all look back with a sense of humor and remember how we felt
and how, in the huge scheme of things, it really wasn’t that important, or disastrous.
Difficulties are placed in our path so that we can see just how really clever
we can become in a tough situation. Oh, and I never made that pie again. Whew!
Learned that lesson!
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