Let me preface this story by saying that I love food. LOVE it. You wouldn’t know it from my plethora of hippie-sourced treats (Gluten Free Cluster Puff’n Bits anyone?) but I spend a lot of time daydreaming about the smell of roast beef drippings and complicated chocolate offerings. My favourite Christmas memory shouldn’t centre on the time my most beloved life activity, the placing of food inside my body (mouth), was jeopardized, but it does.
It was December 2006, which was surprisingly similar to the present in every way- save for inferior smartphone technology. The family was gathered at my brother Trevor’s small apartment because he is a print journalist and print journalists aren’t really allowed to have families, normal holidays, money or in the case of male print journalists- a clean-shaven face. They often try though, which makes us love them even more. The weeks leading up to that particular Christmas were spent thinking about the succulent, maple-glazed ham my parents had promised and if I’m honest, I often bragged about said ham to others. That ham was my brilliant star in the east.
Smug Amanda- “So what are you eating for Christmas Dinner?”
Person who doesn’t care about conversation- “ Oh I dunno. Turkey probably.”
Smug Amanda- “Not us. We’re tired of turkey so we’re doing a massive ham. We’ll drizzle it in maple syrup and broil it with the deft touch of culinary Phoenixes.”
And so forth.
The following weeks would have been a brilliant time for my parents to let me know that a) they had not purchased a ham and b) they were going to wing it in a small town grocery store on Christmas Eve day. They got a turkey. The only turkey they could find. This was followed by an hours long journey to acquire a roasting pan somewhere, anywhere. Whether or not you believe in a higher power, I’m convinced this was the universe stepping in and telling us to plan a taco night, however, in a display of family tenacity, my parents ignored the universe and pushed on. There- behind the Quality Street chocolates and dusty tins of smoked oysters at the final store, lay one solitary pan, as bottles of teriyaki sauce kept their watch by night.
Christmas morning passed by peacefully and our family easily slipped into a familiar holiday eating pattern. Basically it entails eating a bunch of morning crap, skipping lunch and entering into a masochist battle of meaty oven smells vs intense hunger for several hours. We got changed, Dad put the turkey in and we began the process of filling time. Many, many hours and half a game of Cranium later, we noticed something. It was the absence of smell. Nothing was in the air. Not even a light spritz of carmelizing skin.
Dad went into the kitchen, opened the lightly warmed oven door and felt the inside. It was less oven-temperature and more of a ‘late June afternoon.’ He closed it and made a sound of intense suffering. Then, like an angel that substituted his lute for a recorder, there it was…the presence of smell.
Rather than killing the turkey’s inevitable bacteria, we had provided it with a perfect recreational environment. Warm, but not too warm, with plenty of protein-packed beaches on which to spread and multiply. We didn’t know the oven’s official time of death, but the old girl was dead. As dead as a doornail.
Dad sprang into denial mode. Despite his 20+ years as a professional chef who cooked for the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Pope John Paul, he began to hack away at the clearly infected carcass in an attempt to STIR FRY it. He may have been throwing away 75 food safety certification courses and risking the lives of his family, but the prospect of wasting meat and intense hunger hit him at his core. He hacked and hacked while we tried to wrestle him away from the counter.
Mom – What are you doing?!?
Dad- SAVING IT.
Resigned Me – It smells disgusting. We’ll all get sick.
At this point he threw a cartoonishly large, cadaver-toned drumstick into a tiny stovetop pan.
Trevor- Dad-
Mom- MARCUS!
Me- DAD.
Everyone – Let it go!
I’m not sure if he eventually relented by his own free will or if the smell made him weak, but his pain was palpable. He instructed my brother to find an open restaurant while he shoved our dreams into a giant garbage bag. My brother to his credit, called every restaurant he could, with the escalating anxiety of a 911 caller. In multi-denominational large cities, finding something to eat on Christmas would have been ridiculously easy, but in small town Ontario, even A & W was closed.
Trevor finally tracked down one family-run Chinese restaurant (even the tiniest hamlet will have one) that was 15 minutes away from closing. He begged for mercy and said we would be there for the buffet in 5 minutes. We scrambled to leave and grabbed the turkey’s body bag. In keeping with the karma of the day though, there was one final catch in store- the apartment building’s quaint policy of locking the garbage room on all Sundays and holidays in keeping with the commandment “thou shalt sort out thine own trash on the Lord’s Day.” We had two options- bring it with us in the car or leave it to fester in the apartment. We chose to bring it, even though we knew we wouldn’t have time to dispose of it beforehand if we actually wanted to eat.
After a buffet that could best be described as “nutritionally sufficient”, it was time to face the scent demons in the car. We cautiously opened the doors and thought we were ready, but nothing can fully prepare you for the pungent aroma of a 2 episode character in Breaking Bad. It was terrifying. Trevor violently started the car and we were each given family duties. My dad needed to scan for open fast food dumpsters, I needed to make sure no one was around and my mother needed to focus on the life she would never have.
We sped around in the rain from locked dumpster to locked dumpster until we found our game-beating reward. Behind the glowing Z of a closed Zellers, there was a giant, open container of freedom. We were the only ones around. I grabbed the massive corpse bag and heaved it to my dad, he leapt out of the car and dunked it majestically into the dumpster. As the only passenger who had participated in high school basketball, my family made the right decision picking him for the first-string. We cheered and he jumped back into the car.
Dad- Go…go… GO!!!
Trevor gunned it through the downpour and we laughed maniacally at the taste of victory for the entire drive back to the apartment. It still smelled like food purgatory, but it didn’t matter, we had won.
I’m pretty sure that looking for a dumpster as a family, and finding one as a family illustrates the true meaning of Christmas better than Boris Karloff himself.
The story even has a moral- never brag about ham. Especially future ham.
Have a delightfully scented weekend everyone, xo
Amanda Terfloth
