Cooker Corner at Christmas
Is someone auditioning for the lead female role in a Nativity play, perchance…?
The Dogs Trust Christmas campaign mailshot, 2020
For more on the Dogs Trust, see here: https://www.dogstrust.org.uk/
As long-term Denizens of Wright History may recall, Duffy was one of The Faces of Christmas (2020), featuring in The Dogs Trust’s Christmas Change the Tale campaign. Fortunately for her, her puppies, and us, in this Canine Carlisle echo of the Christmas story there was room at the inn, courtesy of the wonderful Trust.
…but you don’t KNOW what I’ve BEEN through…
As 2021 ended, we were reflecting - as one does around New Year - on what a difference a year makes. Although Duffy’s paws were firmly and happily under the table by Christmas 2020, she’d been with us for less than four months, and since then, she’s shown steadily more of her character as she’s relaxed ever-more into life at Wrightington Towers. This is, of course, par for the course for any dog or cat settling into a new home, and whilst I don’t tend to anthropomorphize canine or feline behaviour, it must be still more so for adult rescue pets, who have goodness-knows-what in their past.
One aspect of Duffy’s character which has become still more entrenched is her obsession with Cooker Corner: clearly, whatever is being prepared there is infinitely more interesting than the terrible Duffy-fodder which we perversely insist on foisting upon her. This conviction is, of course, entirely our fault. Although we firmly stick to a policy of humans eating before duffies get any human tidbits, she firmly believes that Cooker Corner exists primarily for her delight and sustenance. When we eat - whether a meal at table or casual sofa-snacks - she generally keeps an appropriate distance as we’re eating, but is sometimes moved to switch it up a gear if we linger, perhaps working or chatting, for longer than is acceptable, which is when The Pointed Look is deployed.
If this doesn’t yield the desired response, things may move up to DUFFCON 1 - i.e. the Cooker Corner manoeuvre. When Duffy first moved in, we rewarded her letting us know that she needed to go outside with a treat, but it was quickly apparent that this was already hardwired for her. Nevertheless, a precedent for “go outside; get a treat” was established. Consequently, DUFFCON 1 - aka The Ultimate Move - is to indicate a desire to go outside (which cannot, of course, be ignored - just in case). Once outside, a brief scamper around the patio is surely enough for a reward, so it is appropriate to draw the household’s attention to whatever’s going on in Cooker Corner. If reward is not immediately forthcoming, it’s time for a pointed canine gaze, alternating between human and Cooker until Cooker Corner yields its due bounty, non?
This Christmas also gave us pause for thought (feel free to congratulate me on having resisted the obvious pun there) with regard to how Robert and I have settled into life at Wrightington Towers. Although we have been close friends since 1999, it was just our fourth Christmas as a couple, so it’s not surprising that we are also still settling into things - just as an adult rescue dog comes with baggage, so too does a new partner when one is no longer a spring chicken!
Robert is not a fan of the whole Traditional Christmas Dinner thing, whereas for me, it’s the best bit. I succumbed hook, line, and sinker for the whole cliché many years ago - long before the whole domestic goddess thing was A Thing. I love how the house starts to smell Christmassy a few days in advance.
Image here: https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/The_Muppet_Christmas_Carol?file=Movie-MCC-Finale.jpg
Prepping the nut roast en croûte, red cabbage, stuffing, and bread sauce… dry-brining the turkey, making giblet stock… and even, for several years in my former life - when there was a larger cohort in the home for Christmas - also doing a Christmas Eve goose so that we could also have a family feast with those who don’t observe Christmas, with the useful by-product of fresh goose fat for the next day’s roast potatoes… getting up earlier than everyone else to make Christmas-spiced muffins for breakfast with the presents so that the house smells Christmassy as everyone wakes up… the wafting promise of The Meal To Come permeating the house as the oven is opened for the first check that all is cooking as it should be (ideally celebrated by the inimitable thwwwopp of a sherry bottle being opened)… the table groaning with food, the happy chaos of everyone helping themselves to everything as the nut roast/bird is carved and unceremoniously plonked on the plates…. It was irrelevant that - as is so often the case with feeders - I rarely ate much of anything at the table myself, because second only to seeing my nearest and dearest enjoying what I’ve lovingly made for them is the prospect of leftovers, and Christmas leftovers are the best leftovers of all. Yup. I fell really hard for the whole Christmas Dinner thing at a formative age, and it’s now an inextricable part of my DNA.
How 2018-20 Robert expected to feel at the end of a meal
aka James Gillray, A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion (1792)
This image: New York, The Met; https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/391905
Poor Robert! I brought a lot of baggage to our Christmas table! He knew me for nineteen of the years in which I indulged my inner Christmas-cliché monster in the ex-marital home, and knows how much pleasure it gave me. How could he possibly live up to that??! When faced with a table full of roasted stuff, he wanted to show his appreciation as he thought I needed him to, but his Christmas food baggage was very different to mine. For him, leftovers are boring, seldom tasty, and usually as dry as old boots, so what he doesn’t eat at table is a rejection of any work put into the cooking of it because anything not eaten goes in the bin. As he’s got older, his appetite has become less prodigious than it (in)famously used to be, so when he eats enough to show what he thinks is necessary appreciation, he’ll end up feeling like George, Prince of Wales (right).
For our first three Christmases we compromised, but whilst said compromises were perfectly tasty (a particular hat-tip to Nathan Outlaw’s monkfish with sage, cranberry and pine nut stuffing, which was, I’m certain - with apologies to Messrs R. T. of Leicestershire and Marinetti - infinitely better than Gammon of a Badger roasted or Aerofood), they didn’t really do the trick for either of us. Robert still felt that he needed to hoover up everything on the table unto Prince George levels and subsequently regretted it and couldn’t countenance the idea of leftovers, and I didn’t get my “hit” of Christmas spirit. But we cracked it this year.
Since my Spawn moved back to York last summer, she’s been at Wrightington Towers more regularly, often for meals, which are no longer Visits-with-a-Capital-V or Meals-with-a-Capital-M, which is far more relaxed all round. By November, Robert was actually requesting leftovers-meals (especially after classes in the evening), so I tentatively suggested ordering a whole turkey, knowing that Lara would be here to attack the Christmas table with gusto (and that my ex-husband and his partner would be willing recipients of a Christmas Dinner “doggy-bag”), thus fulfilling my ridiculously shameless need for culinary gratification and relieving the perceived pressure to eat EVERYTHING ON THE TABLE NOW - a notion which Robert still couldn’t quite shake off. I’m happy to report that consequently, there are now two freezers in York containing a pleasing quantity of leftovers, ready to make lovely suppers at some point in the future, when the joys of Boxing Day leftovers-panini are but a distant memory,* Robert wasn’t stressing, and we had a relaxed Christmas dinner.
*[Continuing my recent theme of culinary suggestions, this is a favourite in both households (from Mr Oliver’s Jamie’s Dinners, but not currently on his website). Back in the day, my pre-Robertian online project was going to be food-related, but as life moved me into a different direction, the link here will suffice. See also Turkey Tom Kha Gai. Maybe I still need to do that food blog after all…]
More importantly for our present purposes, however, Duffy clearly approved of the whole turkey malarkey. Even though Cooker Corner was a place of frustratingly delayed gratification as the giblet stock aromas were making me happy (and even pleasing unto Robert, which pleased me still further), said gratification in the form of giblets and stock-carrots was, it seems, worth the wait.
So yes. Settling into Life at Wrightington Towers continues happily for us all. The next priority is for us all to settle back into the right time zone…