Somehow, I got roped into providing the main course for the department holiday party tomorrow.
Apparently, the last three years, Big Jeff (Little Jeff's larger counterpart) had deep fried a turkey out on the theatre's dock. He graduated last year and no one bothered to remember that, oh, yeah, no one has a deep fat fryer big enough to do a turkey. And, as an added bonus, on Monday they remembered that, oh yeah, it takes three days to thaw a whole frozen bird.
Somehow, as the Treasurer and only graduate student of the organisation in charge of the party, The Boy was semi-blamed for not somehow having realised this, never mind the fact that he was not in any way involved in last year's proceedings. So, he volunteered me.
There are ten pounds of ham and ten pounds of chicken pieces sitting in the fridge right now. The chicken is because I remembered in time that there are at least three Jewish people in the department and they can't eat anything with hooves (and luckily, as we know from experience, semi-kosher is good enough; I certainly don't have the time to hunt up a kosher prepared bird and buy extra dishes). Vegetarians are covered by someone else. Anyway, according to Betty Crocker, that's enough meat to feed sixty people. However, the Betty Crocker cookbook is the 1960's version, so I'm hoping that no more than about forty people show up.
Never mind I've never done anything like this in my life. Outside of camp, the most people I've cooked for is eight, and we had spaghetti. Thank you oh so much, TB, for volunteering me for this wonderful task. I'm just hoping I have enough dishes to bake all the stuff in. And that driving it all to the theatre will not be the adventure I think it's going to be.
I've been awake worrying about it, and it's a good thing because I forgot about the kosher no mixing meat and dairy thing. I was originally going to do the chicken in butter, but I think I'll just have to go with rosemary and aluminium foil now.
I did at least buy a meat thermometer so that I'll know the ham's actually cooked all the way through. Last time I made a ham, it was stone cold in the middle and it was a tenth the size of this one.
Sigh. Wish me luck, will ya?