Queen of the Kitchen

Well, Thanksgiving is over, and most of my left overs are now gone. There are a few remnants of pumpkin pie left in the refrigerator, but other than that Thanksgiving is considered officially over. We now move on to Christmas, but I can't help walking down memory lane and thinking about meals of holidays past. Thanksgiving does that to me. I guess it's because of all the cooking that is involved to make one meal get off the ground. This Thanksgiving I was fortunate to have my father- in- law help me cook the turkey and stuffing, but I haven't been so lucky in years past, especially when I first got married. Let me just put it to you this way, I think my husband lost ten pounds the first year that we were married.
Yes, it is true. My name is Julie, not Julia, as in Julia Child. When I first got married, I remember thinking how easy cooking looked. After all, I watched my mom cook for eight people in my family. Let me stress the word 'watched'. When it came to the actual cooking, well, that was another story. But, how hard could it be? My mom always did great meals, and she never looked like she was having a difficult time. We always had enough, and the food was inviting and comforting. I did not have to cook gourmet, but I could cook family style meals. At least that's what I thought.
I'll never forget one of my first parties. It was not Thanksgiving, but I was going to prepare a whole Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, how naive and stupid. I remember calling my mom and telling her that I was having trouble with the turkey. "What's the matter?" she asked. "I'm having a hard time getting the turkey dethawed for tonight,' I simply replied. "When did you take it out of the freezer?" she asked in a gentle but worried tone. "This morning," I replied. "Why". Her gasp over the phone was all I needed to hear to know that this was a major error and that old tom turkey was going in the hot tub for several hours.
There have been many times when I have had to get creative to cover my cooking blunders. One time I was making mashed potatoes for a family gathering. I have a large extended family; so, I needed to make ten pounds of potatoes. I thought that I would be so smart and peel all the potatoes the night before. The next morning I would boil and mash them. Well, it would have been a good idea if I had put the potatoes in water the night before, but I did not. I don't have to tell you what I found the next morning. The potatoes did not look like potatoes but more like black nuggets of coal. What would I do? Always the eternal optimist, my husband had one of his light bulb moments. We would just cook them up as planned, add every imaginable spice to them, and call them cajun potatoes. Yes, it was brilliant, black cajun potatoes, and you know they didn't taste too bad. Chef Ramsey would never approve, but it passed the family test.
The absolute highlite of my cooking endeavors was the night I invited a college friend and her husband over for supper. You think I would know better. Anyway, I was serving a chicken and rice casserole. Everything was going great. They were enjoying the meal until I started to serve seconds. As I was spooning out the rice, something came up out of the deep crevices of the rice dish. It looked like a curled up snake. Without knowing it, I served it to Greg, my friend's husband. He stared at it for a few seconds and then broke into laughter. Yes, I served him the neck of the chicken. It was a moment I will never forget. I started to laugh myself. You can either laugh or cry, and I would rather laugh.
These are just a few of my cooking adventures. My husband and I are still alive to talk about it; so, that's a good thing. I now have several famous cooks that help me like Betty Crocker and Chef Boy Ar Dee to name a couple. If cooking is an art than I am definitely not an artist. I am not the queen of the kitchen, but if you ask me for cajun potatoes I can gladly oblige.