We aren’t often forced to cook our own dinners – let alone cooking for a bunch of important people our husbands bring home, seemingly on impulse. Well, that happened to me once or twice, and I managed. Read on and find out how!
It was just one of those days: the cook was having a holiday, my phone was broken because I had dropped it into the toilet bowl, and there was no way to get anyone to get help: the children were away (don’t ask me where), my parents had just died – and so on.
I was having a nap; watching half-focused dreams of what I would tell John: how we would have to eat out despite him having issues with many of the neighbours because I couldn’t go out during the day because of my own issues with partly the same neighbours, all of which meant that we would have to drive downtown and he couldn’t start drinking until we came back, unless he wanted to hire a gossipy cab driver to take us there… and the doorbell rang.
It was John. He was panicky. He had a very sweet deal cooking, and to pull it through he felt he had to extend some hospitality to the client and a couple of his friends and their wives. In short, eight people whose tastes could well vary from the boorish to the exquisite, and who, for various reasons, were not keen on showing their faces in public – not with us at any rate. Great. Get married, ladies!
I was about to explode but the often-heard phrases “a few thousand” and “under the counter” helped me contain my temper. There was food in the fridge! I was able! I had a couple of hours! I could take something to pep myself up a bit now, and some Valium later! Or Xanax, I don’t care!
The first thing I did was arrange our best booze on the nice table right at the entrance of the dining room. I poured generous slugs of some expensive cognac in deceptively shaped glasses and spiked them up with my own mixture of different chemicals, some of them only approximately legal. Then I went to the kitchen and emptied the contents of the fridge on the table. Luckily there was some food there too.
Now, I really can’t remember what I actually cooked. The upper-downer-booze cocktails made certain nobody else remembered any of it either. The deal worked out, we all had huge hangovers the next day, nobody contacted any STD:s from the others… in a word, perfect!
A word of warning: you might want to make certain none of the guests has any hidden agendas if you try out these recipes. The second time I tried to pull a similar stunt I actually had to do time. But that’s just a part of a resourceful housewife’s repertoire these days!