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    Recipes for Disaster: A Memoir
    Recipes for Disaster: A Memoir
    Recipes for Disaster: A Memoir
    Ebook247 pages4 hours

    Recipes for Disaster: A Memoir

    By Tess Rafferty

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Starting with the Thanksgiving turkey that never quite finishes cooking, then moving to the polenta that unceremoniously goes runny and the guests that arrive a day early—there is no topic Tess Rafferty fails to encounter, or hilariously recount. Recipes for Disaster is as though Bridget Jones wrote a culinary narrative—the most pristine of intentions slowly disappear, as does the wine along with any hope of a seamless and well-orchestrated dinner party.
    Told with heart, humor and honesty; this memoir goes beyond culinary catastrophe and heartwarmingly unveils the lengths we go to in order to please our family, friends, and ourselves—and proves that it's not the food that counts, but the memories. Aptly timed for all the Thanksgiving chefs about to enter the holiday gauntlet; or the guests headed to their dinners—this is the perfect book to read and then savor.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 30, 2012
    ISBN9781250018342
    Recipes for Disaster: A Memoir
    Author

    Tess Rafferty

    For 7 ½ years TESS RAFFERTY wrote on the cult comedy show, The Soup, where she skewered pop culture, parodied celebrities and helped her co-workers pick out gifts for their wives. She has frequently been seen on camera as herself, Posh Spice, a Succubus, a “Guidette” from Jersey Shore, and perhaps most notably “The Dancing Maxi Pad.” While at Emerson College, Tess started performing stand up comedy at the clubs and Chinese restaurants around Boston, Massachusetts and continues to perform stand up in Los Angeles, when not holding herself to ridiculous standards at dinner parties or learning to speak Italian. Tess is also a regular performer at the storytelling show, Public School, and frequently reads her essays at the Pez show. She can also be seen discussing pop culture on the TV Guide Channel and VH1. A drinking “enthusiast,” Tess enjoys wine, specifically good wine. She’s tasted wine from the Napa Valley to Long Island to the island of Ischia, and at every airport bar in between. Her travels have led to an appreciation for good food, which she attempts to bring home and recreate for her friends, with varying degrees of success. She is the author of the memoir Recipes for Disaster. She lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, husband, (SIC) their 3 ungrateful cats, a modest wine collection and a pool. So, nothing bad can happen here.

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      Book preview

      Recipes for Disaster - Tess Rafferty

      Chapter 1

      How to Cook a Turkey, or The Stomach: Not the Way to a Man’s Pants

      The final Thanksgiving I spent with my family my father said grace. We were not a religious family, despite the fact that we had all done some time in Catholic school. Sure, we had gone to church weekly when we were kids, but it became more sporadic as we got older. We had First Communions, mostly because we were Italian and when you’re Italian, that’s your first fund-raiser. But we never heard righteous treacle like, God has this in his plan for you, and for that I will always be grateful to my parents.

      I don’t remember us saying grace much, if ever, which is why it was so strange when my father said, Dear Lord, we would like to thank you for everything you’ve given us. We have one child who smokes and another who’s been kicked out of school, but at least we have each other, Lord, although sometimes that’s not much of a consolation.

      It was my freshman year of college. I hadn’t been planning to come home at all, but at the last minute I found myself both missing my boyfriend and cooling on the friend at whose house I had been planning to spend the weekend. So I came home with my friend Erin in tow.

      My grandmother had been the cook in the family and after she died three years prior, Thanksgiving became a rather forgettable holiday. Her amazing stuffing had been replaced with Stove Top. We stopped spending the holiday with our cousins, aunts, and uncles and as my father has already mentioned, he and my mother and my brother and I weren’t much consolation to each other. So after that first Thanksgiving home, I decided that I had no compelling reason to go home for that again, certainly not with Christmas a mere four weeks later. I wonder now if my grandmother had lived longer—or if my mother or her siblings had been able to continue the culinary tradition—if that would have changed things. After all, people who go home regularly for holidays usually talk about how they can’t wait for a favorite aunt’s pie or their mother’s sweet potatoes, and their travel experiences and family dynamics must be just as difficult as mine have always been. Maybe it’s the food that keeps you coming back. I’ve been known to put up with a lot of bullshit in order to eat some truly delicious food. I never turn down an opportunity to eat at Osteria Mozza even though I’m certain child molesters on death row are served their last meal with less attitude. Bad service, condescending friends, judgmental siblings … isn’t it all the same thing?

      So, the following year, Thanksgiving away from home, while fun, wasn’t much of a culinary adventure. Erin and I spent the holiday in Boston, eating canned vegetables and watching Moonlighting reruns on an obscure cable channel. The year after was too much of one. I found myself in Prague with my roommate: two girls alone who had just walked into a gigantic beer hall of an establishment, filled only with men. The tables ran the length of the room and had benches instead of chairs; what we now refer to charmingly as family style, but in that moment felt more like gang rape than family. They made room for us at a table and instead of having their way with us, just handed us menus written entirely in Czech. Fortunately, we were sitting by the one man who spoke a small amount of English, enough to point to one item on the menu that was chicken and Camembert. It was simple but good, much better than we expected and we went back again the next night.

      The following year I decided to cook. For the first time I was living alone, in what felt like a spacious one-bedroom apartment, one floor beneath a roof deck. It was about five hundred square feet and the last flight of stairs was so old and crooked it felt like they performed back-alley abortions at the top. The only heat in the apartment was on the side of the stove. It was a pipe, punctured with many small holes and encased in a metal box. Periodically the pipe would fill with gas and then the pilot would light it so that what was heating your house was nothing more than a pipe with flames coming out of it. The heat would cause the metal case to expand and then about five minutes after the heat shut off, it would snap back into its original place with a THANG! All night you would hear this cycle as you tried to sleep: the hiss of natural gas filling your apartment, the THWOOOOSH as the entire pipe caught fire, and then, once you finally started to get back to sleep, the metallic THANG of the metal contracting, the whole time thinking it was a distinct possibility you would never live to see the morning.

      My apartment was in the North End of Boston, the quaint Italian section of town that had not yet been touched by high-end condos and supermarket chains. Every day I would walk home past Polcari’s, the spice store run by the ancient brother and sister who sold spices by the ounce in little paper bags for fifty cents. They had whole coffee beans, an assortment of rice and flours, and the best price on chocolate-covered espresso beans anywhere in the city. Across the street was Bova’s bakery, which was open twenty-four hours a day, because someone was always inside baking bread. No matter what time of the night I was coming home, I could always get fresh bread, usually still hot from the oven, and my friends and I would plunge our drunken fists into the center and pull out chunks of the warm, white fluff. There were a couple of different butcher shops, a few produce markets, a liquor store. There were numerous pastry shops and every Easter they’d have cakes shaped like lambs with white coconut frosting in the window. It sounds totally garish, but I loved them because I remembered seeing them every Easter dinner as a little girl. Right before I turned down my street was the Boston I, the closest thing they had to a grocery store. It reminded me of the market my grandmother had gone to while I was growing up. They sold deli meats in the back and the shelves were stacked with pasta and soups and necessities. That was a family-run business, too, and as I never had an extra key, if I had to make sure a friend needed to get into my apartment, I left it with Chuckie or Cheryl behind the counter. I could walk home every day and do my shopping as I went; talk to Miss Polcari about what to do with cream of tartar, ask the butcher what looked good, get a little local

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