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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250018342 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 584 KB |
About the Author
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." Her first feature film, Thicker Than Water, is scheduled to begin filming in July 2012.
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 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.
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.
Read an Excerpt
Recipes for Disaster
A Memoir
By Tess Rafferty
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2012 Tess RafertyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01834-2
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 gossip.
Maybe it was the inspiration I found daily at the markets or the nostalgia inducing lamb cakes that made me want to cook that year. But most likely, it was Simon.
Simon was in my ballet class freshman year. I was a savvy enough freshman to know that men in your (elective) ballet class weren't good crush material, and I still held onto this notion long after I learned (to my surprise) that Simon was straight. The next semester he was in my jazz dance class. He was a handsome, skinny guy with longish hair, always in a sleeveless black T-shirt and black bike shorts, two earrings and no smile. The summer after jazz class, we found ourselves taking the same extracurricular acting class from a teacher we both loved who had his own studio. The work was entirely movement based and it was another opportunity for Simon to wear his jazz/ballet ensemble. Eventually we had a Shakespeare class together and I finally got to see him in pants. By this time I knew he had a girlfriend who was a year ahead of me and they felt practically married. He seemed like one of those people who took "the work" very seriously, whatever work, whether it was ballet, jazz, Shakespeare, or bartending. I didn't trust people like that as I was afraid if I took anything that seriously I could still fail and then what?
Despite our increasing number of classes together we didn't become friends until he and his girlfriend broke up. Not that it was romantic; I just think when they were no longer together he was forced to open up his world a bit, especially as they had had so many friends in common. I was going through something of a breakup, too, having had a falling out with my roommate of three years. The timing was right: we both needed a new friend.
I remember exactly when it shifted. We were in Shakespeare class together, tying our shoes after getting into our Elizabethan garb and he said, "You're going to call me this summer, right, Tess?"
I was shocked that he wanted to be my friend. Sure, after three years of ballet tights, iambic pentameter, and crawling across the floor pretending to be prehistoric protozoa, we had finally relaxed a bit and started to actually make each other laugh. But now this once standoffish person who it took me three years to get comfortable with wanted to actually be my friend outside of school, like real friends. Not just the fake kind who pretend to like each other in class because their girlfriend of three years dumped them and they have no one else to talk to.
I assured him I would call him, and so I did, getting his voice-mail each and every time. Simon never called back. Finally, I called, he didn't answer, and so I left my last message. "Hi, Simon, it's Tess. I only take this shit from guys I sleep with. Call me back." He did that day, laughing.
He was a few years older than the rest of us and had friends and experiences and a life outside of our college, which was one of the reasons I liked being his friend. He had a perspective that most other people I knew lacked, and also, a determination; having been on his own since sixteen, he worked as a bartender three or four nights a week until two in the morning to pay for school. I saw myself in him, or at least wanted to. Since I had gotten back from Europe the year before, I felt stifled; my world had once again been limited to the lives and dramas of people in a four-block radius. When you're staring at the Colosseum, it's kind of hard to think that who got the lead in the Sondheim musical is going to matter in two thousand years. I returned to Boston with a desire to work hard, study hard, and achieve great things. And now one of these great things I wanted to achieve was having sex with Simon.
It started in the fall. We had both been cast in an obscure German play written by a man who spent his entire life looking for the perfect woman to commit suicide with. The director of our play was a crazy Dutchman, who had an Italian name and only one testicle, which for some reason I knew about. As would become a pattern in my life, my relationship with Simon developed over food.
Every night before class we would meet for dinner. I was always on my way back to campus from work and he was coming from class and neither one of us had time to return home to eat. It became a ritual, both of us just showing up at the acting studio each night. He'd put his arm around me and I'd say, "Are we dining?" He'd say, "Yes," and off we would go to spend an entire hour's worth of retail pay on a fancy Back Bay sandwich just so we could talk. And one of these days as he was talking, his voice soft and raspy due to damage during childhood surgery, there was something about the combination of his words and the look on his face. I looked at him and was overwhelmed with the urge to say, "I like you."
What I didn't like was the sandwich I was having that night. Something didn't taste right about it and I was worried that I was having some sort of an allergic reaction. Simon was doing most of the talking at this point, and didn't seem at all worried that I might be turning blue or puffing up at any moment. But when we got up to leave he saw that my sandwich was mostly untouched. He took a moment to wrap it up and said, "I vomited so much of my own neurosis onto the table, there wasn't any room for your sandwich." These were the most romantic words I had heard to date!
After rehearsal that night, we went with the rest of the cast for drinks and Crazy Dutch Director with Italian Name came with us. The two beers I had on my non-sandwich-filled stomach left me feeling pretty buzzed (Oh, for the days when I had no tolerance!) and in no position to react well when Crazy Dutch Director asked me why I was so bitter. Um, maybe because crazy, foreign, one-balled men who should be old enough to know better buy me drinks and then insult me? Despite Simon coming to my defense, I felt awkward and self-conscious so naturally, Simon and I go back to the Mad Dutchman's house for bourbon. I don't drink bourbon.
I was drunk on my ability to have an opinion. He was drunk on his delusions of Svengaliism. We were both drunk on bourbon. What followed was the interrogation of a mouthy, idealstic college girl armed with way too much reading, by a man with one testicle and English as a second language. At one point he tells me to, "Go into politics then, don't be an actor!" At another he says, "I ask you questions and you respond with tears." At another, I am on his lap and he is drying my tears. It was around this point that Simon tells me we have to go. Good call. He takes me back to his place, gives me water and goldfish crackers to "slow the alcohol down from reaching the liver." (Does this actually work?) The two of us pass out platonically on his bed as the sun comes up. I loved this man!
The next morning we tried to make sense of the bizarre evening and he says to me, "I want you to know, Tess, if I had thought you were in any danger, I would have had you out of there, if I didn't think it was safe." I so loved this man!
October rehearsals gave way to November and as that month started to slip away and we drew closer to opening night, I knew I was nearing the end of my daily excuse to see Simon. Determined to take our relationship to the next level, I formulated a plan. I needed to create an opportunity to spend more time with him; time when he didn't have to take off for his 10 p.m. shift at the club. I would have to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Wasn't it the same with Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown? Doesn't she invite herself over to Thanksgiving dinner because she has such a crush on him?
Rounding out my guest list was one of my best friends, Anna, a grad student in literature; her very English boyfriend, Nigel; the very opinionated Regina who was on her third year as a senior; and my brother, the drummer, Junior.
Junior was in his first year at the Berklee College of Music, also in Boston. I had been excited that he was going to school in the same town I was and had visions of us hanging out and going to concerts together. As it turned out, he went out and he went to concerts. I stayed home and tried to reach him and I worried.
I was predisposed to worry about him ever since the time I was five and he was three and we were playing at my grandmother's house. My mother walked into the room and started freaking out. This was not uncommon. The reason, however, was. My brother had eaten some of my mother's cigarettes. Later he would learn that not only could they be smoked, you could actually smoke stuff better than cigarettes. And then one day still later, I would see him eat that, too. But that day he was just eating cigarettes.
My mother looked at me. "Why weren't you watching him?"
Looking back now, I realize the answers to that question were the following: a) not my son, b) not my cigarettes, and c) I'm five.
But at the time I just thought, "Oh, I guess that's my job," and the role of the overprotective older sibling was forged.
His first week of school he called me at work to find out how to get to Providence, Rhode Island, by train. He didn't know anyone in Providence; he didn't know anyone in Boston yet. I told him to take the commuter rail and tried to give him all the information I could before I had to get back to work. I worried the rest of the shift. Would he know to get back before the trains stopped running? Would he not get himself mugged or arrested? He'd had his first run-in with the law that summer for misdemeanor jackassery, which had gotten plea-bargained down to first degree being a stoner, but I didn't know if he'd be as lucky in a town where his lawyer wouldn't be a friend of my father's who normally handled high-profile murder cases. And exactly why again was he going to Providence? As soon as I got off work, I tried to call him back. And I kept trying for the next twenty-four hours. What would he do if he missed that last train? Would he try to hitchhike? Would he try to sleep in the park? When he finally picks up, he tells me that he spent the night in Providence ... in Cheap Trick's hotel suite.
My first thought is what exactly did my brother do to get into Cheap Trick's hotel suite. But then he explains one of the band members has a kid who played soccer with a friend of my brother's at Berklee and so they all went down to Providence to see them play. My brother wasn't performing untoward acts to get backstage, he was actually hanging with someone's dad.
Another night I had gotten home rather late to find my door open. I had given my brother a key in case he ever needed to come by, but still, that was no reason he should leave the door wide open. I found him "asleep" on a haphazardly pulled out futon that had one whole half pulled up onto a trunk. I panicked as it got increasingly harder to wake him up and when I finally did I noticed his T-shirt was smeared with blood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Recipes for Disaster by Tess Rafferty. Copyright © 2012 Tess Raferty. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
Epigraph,
1. How to Cook a Turkey, or The Stomach: Not the Way to a Man's Pants,
2. How to Have an Elegant Dinner Party with No Furniture,
3. How to Enjoy a Good Meal with Friends,
4. How to Throw an Impromptu Dinner Party for 7 at 1 a.m.,
5. How to Count Your Blessings,
6. How to Have a Fun Christmas Party for Adults & Children, and Even the Hosts (Yes, That Means You),
7. How to Serve a Specialty Drink with an Iron Fist,
8. How to Throw a Baby Shower for 100 People and Not Hate Babies or People,
9. How to Carry a Theme Too Far,
10. How to Learn to Love Yourself Again After Serving Runny Polenta,
11. How to Pair Wine with Food and Which Medical Weed to Never Mix with Entertaining,
12. How to Cook Without Cooking,
13. How to Cook a Gluten-Free Vegetarian Dinner with No Lactose or Fruits or Vegetables or Nuts,
14. How to Throw a Dinner Party for 2 and Save Your Relationship,
Epilogue: How to Have a Wedding Dinner for 12,
About the Author,
Disclaimer,
Copyright,