Kitchen Disaster #2

Since the turkey incident, my esteemed Mother-in-Law didn't have much faith in my cooking abilities.  Then, when she next visited her loving son and his worthless-in-the-kitchen wife, she wanted to make her famous lentil soup.   A little background: I had moved into this 2 room house occupied by my then future husband, and inherited the lousy gas oven, and whatever else was in the kitchen, including a jar of dried lentils.   So, I tell Mother-in-law that we don't need to buy any, we already have some, let's just get the necessary vegetables that you need.  She soaks the lentils overnight, she starts the soup the next day AND THEY NEVER GET SOFT!   Evidently the lentils were so old they were useless.  Weathering her disdainful looks, I toss off that scientists had recently uncovered lentils in Egyptian sarcophagi and they cooked up just fine!  Unfortunately that remark did not win me any favor with her at all.

Kitchen Disaster #1

When I was first married, we used to take turns cooking Thanksgiving between my house on Maui, my mother-in-law's in Honolulu, or my sister-in-law's in Kauai.  The first time they came to my house, they arrived from the airport at about 11am and wanted to eat immediately. (Both of them were extremely thin with voracious appetites and ridiculous metabolisms.) I had intended the turkey to be ready closer to 2pm.  So we commenced to eat crudites and drink copius amounts of rum & coke (me), beer (hubby) and whiskey (mother-in-law) and get properly sloshed.  Meanwhile, I kept checking the turkey in the gas oven and it wasn't cooking as fast as I thought it should.  Finally, about 4pm, and basically drunk as skunks, it was determined that the oven had failed and I had been trying to cook the turkey for about 8 hours on pilot light!  Fortunately, we had a microwave oven that had been a wedding gift, and my husband being quite talented with a carving knife, cut the turkey up and we cooked it in the microwave.  Or at least I think we did, what I remember, that is.