Sac Foodies

10th Day of Christmas: My Day-After Christmas Dinner Disaster

December 16, 2007

By guest blogger Steve Frith, FH Intern

As many of you know, Christmas and the holidays are a time for friends, family and food. My group of five friends and I have a close relationship: we’ve been friends for more than 10 years and have become as close as brothers. For that reason, two years ago, we decided to make our own day-after Christmas dinner, with just us guys.

There were some key differences between our meal and the traditional family sit-down. For example, football was the main attraction and we served Samuel Adams instead of wine. For our only side dish, we decided to stick to delicious Betty Crocker Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes (ready in just 20 minutes!). We also planned on serving turkey because none of us had ever cooked one before. And thanks to Sarah, Kris’s girlfriend, we had holiday decorations including a nice tablecloth and candles. She even set it all up before leaving us to cook.

Everyone arrived at Kris’s house around 1:00 – just in time for the game. We wanted to eat between 4-5, so we told Kris to put the turkey in the oven and we would worry about the rest later. At about 4:00, we started getting the mashed potatoes ready, and we told Kris to check the turkey. He took the bird out of the oven and started pushing the electronic thermometer into the turkey; he got about three inches in before he said he was having trouble.

Apparently Kris doesn’t cook meat very often because no one had passed on to him the important information that you need to defrost meat before you cook it. He just threw a completely frozen turkey in the oven! After about 15 minutes of laughing, we started wondering what else we could do. So we called Pizza Guys, and ordered three large pizzas.

So there we were, on our day-after Christmas dinner: six brothers, a nice Christmas table cloth, mashed potatoes, beer, and pepperoni pizza with the half frozen turkey still sitting on top of the oven. None of us had any complaints and we had a great time nonetheless.

This event showed me that while food is still my favorite part of holiday meals, sometimes the memories are just as good. Oh, and yes – we did light the candles.

Entry Filed under: Turkey. Tags: 12 days of Christmas, dinner disaster, Turkey.