Not The Turkey We Were Planning

This year was our turn to host Christmas dinner for both our families. So of course there was the usual stress around making the house presentable, ensuring we had all the food we would need and of course, planning cooking times to ensure that the food was ready to eat when we wanted it.

We currently have three fridges running at home and all of them were stuffed to the brim with food and drink to get us through Christmas and Boxing Day to avoid having ot return to the shops before we wanted to.

Late afternoon Christmas eve I went out to the fridge in the shed to grab a coke and the door was open because the fridge was so full that it hadn’t quite closed properly. Everything was still plenty cold so it obviously hadn’t been for too long. No biggie, I simply rearranged some stuff and made sure the door was closed.

Fast forward to Christmas morning and after a leisurely sleep in we decided we should start the process of prepping to make sure we’d have a successful dinner. I went out to the fridge to get the prawns out to thaw. While they were cold (and still frozen) they didn’t seem to be quite as cold as I’d expect. On opening the fridge, it too seemed less cold than it should be. I listened and the lack of any motor sounds wasn’t a great clue. The fridge in question had only been put in the shed for storage and so isn’t optimally placed for connection to power. It’s on the other side of the shed from the power point that we use, connected via extension cord. Following the cord back to the source, I quickly found the problem. The cord had been knocked out of the wall socket.

Both the supposed-to-be glorious turducken and the turkey that we’d bought to make sure we had enough food to feed a small third world nation the family had been stored in that fridge and therefore hadn’t been correctly refrigerated for the better part of 18 hours. Googling ensued. After all the birds were still cool, they certainly weren’t room temperature, but at the same time, they weren’t cold. The googling news wasn’t good. There wasn’t anything that suggested we should be cooking and serving them. Which was fine other than the fact that it was Christmas day and the of options to replace our carefully planned dinner were limited.

One thing in our favour was that we had no lunchtime commitment so we had time on our side. We jumped in the car and found that a couple of IGA’s (Small grocers for those that aren’t from here) were open but of course the chance that someone had a lonely turkey sitting around were slim.

The first one had a couple of chickens and a smoked turkey roll, the next one didn’t have anything. As we travelled around we received the message from the kids that our local KFC was open (at this point we were canvassing all options and had joked about having traditional Japanese Christmas fare!)

The last small supermarket we went to had a nice piece of double-smoked Barossa ham. It was decision time. We bought the ham, confirmed that KFC would be an option and locked it in.

I smoked and glazed the ham and we put buckets of KFC on the table with our vegetables. Christmas dinner done! It might not have been the most traditional version of Christmas we’d ever had but given the stress levels during the 'can we or can’t we cook the birds' debate, it was about as low-stress as we could have made it and of course, the true joy of the occasion was celebrating with the families not the food that was on the table (Though the ham was bloody good!)