Christmas Festivities

For some reason, my family thought this story was hilarious and begged me to blog about it. It is extremely long. Here is what happened this Christmas.

Wait; first, I should give some background. Our site coordinator is a fabulous cook. During our month-long orientation, we were terribly spoiled to have her prepare meals for us on a fairly frequent basis. It was a cruel shock to some of us when we moved out on our own and had to fend for ourselves. Almost any occasion is one to beg her to cook for us: birthdays, holidays, weekends, and illness. This Thanksgiving was like none I had ever experienced. Therefore, we were all tremendously excited for Christmas dinner with astronomical expectations. The second thing you should know is that I do not have such a reputation. Blair and I cook well enough, but tend to make meal selections on how few dishes it requires. In addition, I do not like to cook meat. It requires a more careful approach in order not to catch such fun things as E. coli and salmonella, and I would rather just chop vegetables how I like and then make sure they are fully cooked. It is really much simpler.

For the Christmas feast, Phyllis did not have enough room in her refrigerator or oven for the necessary preparation. I live just down the street, have a largish refrigerator, and know how to work my oven, so I was selected to help with the overflow. About 6pm on Christmas eve, just before going to watch Polar Express with the other volunteers, I was stocked with three pans of macaroni and cheese and two legs of lamb with careful instruction for the cooking of said dishes the following morning.

I awoke at 7:45 to preheat my oven. At 8:00, as instructed, I began to put the lamb in the oven. Did I mention that I do not like to cook meat? The first pan was fine; it slid onto the bottom rack. The second pan, however, was simply too large to fit, both in length and in width. I am also not a morning person, so with my morning logic, decided to try to see if I had a smaller pan in which the second leg would fit. I do not. This determination came about only after sloshing a bit of the marinade all down the side of my cabinet. Thus begins the saga of the lamb juice. By this time it is about twenty past, so I am awake enough to know that I need to actually clean up the mess with antibacterial soap before making coffee and becoming human.

Two and a half hours later, Rachel, Shurie, and I have eaten our Christmas omelets and French toast, done the dishes, and know the lamb should be finished soon. I take the first leg out of the oven and discover that this is not longer the easy process it was this morning when the majority of the lamb juice was congealed or still in the lamb. Now, it was overflowing from the pan all into my oven that has not cooked any meat in over a year. I do not know how to tell if lamb is done, so I call on Shurie for a second opinion. Rachel, like my former roommate, is a vegetarian. Shurie also did not know, and I do not have a meat thermometer, so we cut into it to see what would happen. Other than a few more drops of lamb juice on top of the range, there is nothing remarkably undercooked looking, so we declare it done. We then set about cleaning up lamb juice, round two.

Until now I have forgotten to mention that the marinade Phyllis created is bright yellow. She does not share recipes, so I am fairly clueless as to what it actually contains but it smells strongly somewhere between mustard and curry (both of which can be yellow, so I think are good guesses). We called Phyllis in to be the judge on the doneness of the meat and to rescue the second leg that would in no way fit in my oven. She said the lamb needed forty-five additional minutes, so back into the oven it went. By this time it is about 12:30 and lunch is scheduled for 3pm. We have just enough time to finish the lamb, heat the macaroni (which was thankfully already cooked), and be driven down the road.

We failed to factor in the time it would take us to figure out how to get the lamb and all its juice down the road in a car without turning everything in our path yellow. So at 2:45, Phyllis’s husband arrives to pick us up. First we try just carrying the pan, which results lamb juice on the floor and all over the front of my pants. Second we try to arrange some plastic bags for collection (looking back on it, I have no idea how we thought this method would work), which resulted with more lamb juice exploding from the bags, coating the oven, my floor, and most of Rachel. Finally, we converted a cardboard box that had arrived as Rachel’s Christmas package into a lamb juice transportation device. By this time, our ride has been sitting outside for fifteen minutes. Despite my usual meat juice cleaning policy, we left it as it was. At least this was cooked lamb juice. We climbed into the SUV with hot pans of macaroni and a box of lamb. Our method mostly succeeded until we took the last turn into the compound, and the cardboard box decided it was tired of containing lamb juice, so Shurie got her portion in her lap. We delivered the food and broke out the antibacterial wipes in hopes of at least looking presentable even if we would all continue to smell like lamb juice for several days.

The gathering itself was lovely as expected. The food was also wonderful, though I cannot say I tried the lamb. We sang carols, told stories, and exchanged our secret Santa gifts. It was a Christmas to remember.

The three of us took turns cleaning up lamb juice when we returned to my house. Within a couple of days, the smell went away, and the oven and floor eventually lost the yellow tint. Now all that remains is a couple of stained dishtowels that will never be the same.