Dishes and Hubris in the Kitchen

Last week, thanks to the confluence of The Month of Gubbi and Operation Expat Thanksgiving, I spent about 30 hours right here:

Okay yes, this was partially an excuse to show you the awesome “No Women” sign that my male boss got me when we were working in Saudi Arabia, which hangs - appropriately? ironically? you be the judge! - in our kitchen.

I’m not really allowed to complain about our kitchen, because it’s pretty nice as far as foreign kitchens go. Most importantly, we have a garbage disposal, and having a garbage disposal is EXTREMELY DREAMY AND RARE among flats in Dubai - or anywhere outside the US, in my experience.

[Sidenote: so rare are garbage disposals outside the US that Alex, who grew up overseas, lives in a perpetual state of bemused fascination regarding this, his first garbage disposal ever. Every time I put something down it - even something mundane like an orange peel - he’ll be like “REALLY? You can put THAT down the disposal? Are you SURE?!” One time, he accidentally dropped a metal screw down the drain and was like, “WELL THAT’S IT, WE CAN NEVER USE THE SINK AGAIN, THIS TRANSGRESSION WILL UPSET LORD GARBAGE DISPOSAL” and then was really amazed when I matter-of-factly reached my fingers in and grabbed the screw out as though the disposal was not, in fact, a mercurial and ill-tempered god.]

The trade-off for having a garbage disposal is that we don’t have a dishwasher (I don’t know why this is a trade-off, but according to Dubai “logic” it’s a zero-sum game), meaning that five days after Thanksgiving, my counter tops still look like this:

Okay, fine, I’ve been a little lazy.

Anyhow! The point of all this is to say that I learned an important lesson about hubris last week in the final hours of preparing our Thanksgiving feast.

Flush with the success of my homemade giblet pan gravy for a crowd (seriously! I used the icky heart bits and everything!), and imbued with supreme confidence as Master of the Garbage Disposal, I threw the turkey neck down the disposal in my haste to get out the door to dinner while the gravy was hot.

The turkey neck. With all the, I don’t know, vertebrae bones. And cartilage. And flesh. And other… gross, tough, non-grindable turkey things.

Fast forward to 24 hours later, when I finally stumbled back into the kitchen after our late, celebratory night and discovered that not only had I completely blocked up both our sink drains and the disposal, but I had so royally effed the entire kitchen plumbing system that we had turkey juices gushing up through a grate in the floor every time we turned on the sink.

(No, I don’t know how that’s possible either… magic, probably. Dark magic.)

And so as I washed the first round of Thanksgiving dishes in my bathtub, I was reminded that in the kitchen, as anywhere else, pride goeth before a ~~fall~~ groundswell of day-old turkey juices.

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truel said: I want to like this, but it’s so sad! To have your giblet gravy making rewarded with giblet gross floor…ugh!
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cupofchi said: Yeah, we have none of these fancy things in Scotland. But, less things for me to break?
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