Holiday meal rescues share your tips and stories.

You get invited out for a big holiday meal, but someone wants to do the hero dishes (like roast turkey or potatoes. You could bang these out like a boss in your own or work kitchen with the proper equipment that you know, but hey why do you mind? Less work for you, besides it is all about catching up with folks.

You get to their house and it becomes pretty clear it is not going to turn out well. The oven sucks! Timing, well lets just say hopelessly optimistic! Tools? a broken egg slide and some rusty knives.

They turn to you and say "HELP!!!!!! you are good at this"

Mine was arriving to a turkey breast cooking on a BBQ at 527f with unevenly cut up potatoes in large pots on a stove top that cannot fit all the pans and a list on things to go in the oven that need 4 different temperatures.

Ended up using a cake tester to check the turkey temperature holding it against lower lip, reset the expectations of when dinner would arrive then started batch boiling the potatoes to minimise the time in the oven that was turned up to full noise.

Turned out pretty well in the end….

been there done that a few times. I was working at my first restaurant here in the city when one of the owners asked me if I would cook Christmas dinner for himself and 40 family members at the restaurant. I got the staff together and we came in early to cook the turkeys and all the fixings. They wanted to eat at 2pm. I seasoned the the turkey, handed it to my cook and he popped it in the oven. I checked it an hour later and the oven is ice cold. I use a few creative words and pop it into the other oven. No dice its ice cold too. neither one of them is working and we can't get them lit. My cooks start panicking the owner too. I tell them to relax and proceed to build a oven out of a hotel pan and a bunch of sheet trays on top of my flat top. with constant monitoring and sheet tray adjustment we get it beautifully done. with the ovens not working it kinda messed up how we were cooking everything. We ended up setting about 15 chafing dishes on the floor in the hall way and cooking every thing directly in them with sternos. needless to say it was quite a trying day but, the family and more importantly the boss loved everything and nobody got sick and my guys got to go home with $500 tips for their efforts.

There's NOTHING that will rescue mashed potatoes that have had eggnog added instead of milk.

Perhaps a dash of rum? :biggrin: