People who know what to do

...are really welcome dinner guests at my house. Thursday, I was scrambling in the kitchen with 25 hungry guests milling about in the dining room. They weren't exactly getting surly, and I wasn't exactly dans la merde, as they say.* But when Millie (Michael's mom) popped in to ask if she could help, I didn't hesitate to ask her to make a roux for the gravy. She's been married to a Cajun for several decades. The gravy was a masterpiece, velvet richness itself. Later, her son, the aforementioned Michael, asked if he could help and I set two smoked turkeys in front of him, handed him a chef's knife and let him have at it. Sez he, "A gentleman should know how to do such things." He proved himself a gentlemen indeed. The birds were elegantly deconstructed and the resulting parts plated with a sure sense of design.

After dinner, as I visited with guests on the patio and sipped another glbutt of tasty red wine, my mother-in-law stumbled on a broken paver and toppled hard into the bushes. Before I could begin to move Eric and Jaime rushed to her aid. One's a chiropractor, the other worked as an EMT for years. That is, they knew what to do and I would have been dans la merde for sure. Her right wrist was fractured.

There's so much merde in Texas you're bound to step in some.

She'll be okay, according to what I've heard from the doctors. And yet, knowledgeable dinner guests aside, with my getting a nasty cut last Thanksgiving and her fall this year, I think I'll just got out to a steak house next time around. We appear to be jinxed when it comes to this holiday. And the Cow Hill ER really doesn't need our business all that much.

*"Dans la merde" is often translated "in the weeds" by American cooks, according to Michael Ruhlman.

modom