Wherever it's Christmas (p.6)

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory have decided to cook Christmas dinner in the Tardis kitchen. But the Tardis kitchen was built by Time Lords...


Amy handed each of them a sandwich.

"Is this all we get?" Rory asked.  It had been a long time since tea.

"We're cooking for tomorrow.  Deal with it."  She bit into her own sandwich and took a drink of her orange juice.  She plopped down wearily in the console room chair.  She set her glass on the floor and shucked off her old-fashioned shoes.

She massaged her toes while she ate her sandwich.  Rory sprawled in the other chair and the Doctor perched on the steps between them.  He was picking the pickles off of his sandwich one by one and eating them.

"So now what?" he said, running out of pickles and taking a bite of his sandwich.

"Don't tell me," Rory said.  "More shopping."

Amy scowled at him.  "Well, we at least need a grocery list."

"Nope!" the Doctor said.  "This time the Tardis has everything we need."

Amy frowned at him.  "We are not having a Christmas dinner out of your food machine.  All it makes are those bars and sandwiches,"  she shook her sandwich at him.  "I want real food!"

Rory nodded.

The Doctor looked back and forth between them.  "Have either of you ever been in the kitchen?" he asked in disbelief.


The Tardis kitchen was a bit like most kitchens, it had running water, high ceilings, lots of light, and lots of countertops. Other than that, things tended to change.

Today it looked like a hodgepodge of old and new.  Like an old manor house that had been partially updated generation after generation until nothing matched, yet it had a warm homey feeling.

It wasn't a room they used a lot, if they didn't eat at their destinations, she and Rory tended to just grab a bar from the food machine in the small lounge near the console room.

"Why is it all the away back here?"  Amy ask as the Doctor ushered them into the kitchen.

"Design flaw of the type 40," the Doctor said. "I keep trying to convince the old girl to move it closer to the console room, but she seems happy with it where it is."  He patted the door frame.

The Doctor seemed perfectly at home.  "So, where do you want to start?" he asked, clapping his hands.

"Turkey," Amy said.

The Doctor thought about it, "Ah ha!"  He ran over and opened one of the cabinets, he rooted around for a bit, and pulled out a huge platter with a half-eaten turkey on it.

"Voila!"  He held it up proudly.  "Christmas turkey.  Sarah made this for us one year.  I was sure there was some left."

Amy scooted forward and looked at the half eaten carcass.  She poked it with a finger.  It was still warm.  "Eww!"  She jerked her hand back with a shudder.  She shook her hand and glared at the Doctor. "We are not eating something you cooked who knows how many years ago," she said in disgust.

Rory agreed, "That's gross!"

The Doctor just stared at them.  "Humans!  You simply do not understand the nature of time," he said, resigned.  "Fine."  He popped a bit of the turkey in his mouth and chewed with remembered fondness.

Rory gagged.

The Doctor returned the turkey to the time cabinet.

"If all you have is leftovers in here," Amy said.  "Then we are going to have to go shopping for ingredients after all."

"No we won't. I have everything we need right here," the Doctor said. He walked over to a wall covered with cabinets and machines.  He started pushing buttons on one of the machines, it looked like an oversized wall oven.

"No, Doctor," Amy protested.  "We don't want any of your reconstituted food, we want real food, fresh food."

"I know that, Amy," the Doctor said, continuing to program.

"Living beings need living food to remain healthy," he said. "Artificial food, no matter how well constructed, is not enough in the long run.  Time Lords figured that out eons ago.  But farming is a bit difficult in a Tardis, even if there's room for it.  So we developed the temporal gardens."

"Temporal gardens?" Amy asked.  The Doctor finished programming and a hologram popped out of the front of the "oven."

Amy jumped back, and scowled at the Doctor.  He gave her an innocent smile.

"What fresh food do you want?" he asked.  "Anything at all."

"Cranberries," Rory said, coming up behind Amy to get a look.

"Cranberries it is."  The Doctor typed in a command and the hologram solidified into the picture of a raised garden bed.  Like the containers some people grew tomatoes in in their backyard.

A tube came down and shot a seed into the soil.  Instantly a little shoot sprouted up and in less than a minute grew up and out into a full blown berry bush with clusters of bright red berries.  Suddenly water started flooding the bin, growing up the sides of the hologram and drowning the bush.

"Doctor!" Rory yelled.  "The water pipe has busted!"

"It's okay, Rory," the Doctor said, as the entire hologram showed under water, air bubbles traveled upward from under the waving leaves and cranberries floated to the surface.

The Doctor pulled open what looked like an oven door, the hologram cut out.  The Doctor reached in and pulled out a double handful of cranberries.

"There you go, fresh cranberries," the Doctor said, pouring them into Amy's hands.  They were still wet. She almost dropped them in shock.

"How did you do that?" she demanded.

He shrugged.  He hit a button and the hologram returned, the water receded, the soil dried, the bush withered and crumbled back into compost, leaving the bin ready for the next order.

"Time Lord, Amy."  He shrugged.  "Not much use mastering time if you can't do something practical with it."

Amy dumped the cranberries into a bowl on the table.  "Rory can make the cranberry sauce and plum pudding," Amy said.  "He's good at that sort of thing."

"You are?" the Doctor asked.

"I am," Rory said.

"Can you make a meringue?" the Doctor asked.

"Yes," Rory said defensively.  "Why?"

"Oh, no reason."  The Doctor shook his head and turned back to his oven.

"I'll make the bread," Amy said. "I make an excellent brioche."

The Doctor's eyebrows shot up as he looked at her.  Amy wasn't the patient type.

"What?"  Amy said, propping her hands on her hips.  "I'll have you know, I'm good with my hands!"

"Yeah," Rory said on a sigh.

Amy jabbed him with her elbow.

"Right then," the Doctor said.  "I'll do the turkey."  He took an egg out of the cabinet and placed it in the oven.  "You know," he said, as he set controls.  "I once met a human who could do this."  The egg hatched and grew into a turkey in seconds.  "Trouble is, he couldn't figure out how to break into the field."

"So who's going to butcher it?"  Amy asked, looking at the full-grown turkey in the hologram.

"Don't look at me," Rory said, stepping back.

"Or me," the Doctor said.  He turned a dial on the machine.  It dinged and he reached in and pulled out a freshly butchered, defeathered turkey, like he was pulling it out of the fridge.  He answered Amy's dubious look.  "Time Lords may like fresh food, but they draw the line at doing their own butchery.  There are machines for that."

"Uhm.  Actually, Doctor," Amy said, "I'm not sure I know how to cook completely from scratch.  For example, I don't know how to make ginger ale for punch."

Rory nodded.

"Oh, no problem," the Doctor said.  "We have supplies too.  It's just you asked for fresh."  He patted the machine. "This is as fresh as it gets."

Rory let his breath out in a whoosh, "Good, I'm not sure I know how to manufacture brown sugar."

"Depends," the Doctor said, off hand, "if you want actual maple sugar or the brown cane sugar sold in your modern stores."

Rory frowned, not knowing if he was serious or not.  "Store-bought sugar should be fine."

The Doctor waved at the cabinets across the room.  "First door, middle shelf.  Should be some raisins in there too."

"Then flour," Amy said, rolling up her sleeves.  "I suppose that machine can make butter for me?" she asked the Doctor.

"Ah, no.  Milk products are a bit trickier, we have to grow the cattle, then breed it, then wait till it calves, then milk it.  Not to mention churning and separating the butter.  Better just to buy it. There should be some in the pantry."

"And I'll need eggs," Amy said.

The Doctor slid open a vertical storage locker beside the machine.  Inside the narrow cover was an array of eggs.  All in little velvet lined cubby holes.  All different kinds, big, little, round, oval, plain, speckled, even a few striped ones.  "What kind?" the Doctor asked.

"Uh, chicken eggs?"  Amy said dubiously.

"Good choice!" the Doctor said.  "Salamander eggs are so rubbery."  He handed her two perfectly ordinary looking eggs.  "And I'll need some herbs."  He turned back to his machine and started programming.

Rory had moved across the kitchen, and was rummaging through the cabinets, pulling out various ingredients.  He turned back to the Doctor.  "Do you have any brandy?"

"Should do," the Doctor said, pulling a huge roasting pan out of one of the lower cabinets and transferring the turkey into it.  "Look in the wine cellar in the corner."  He pointed towards a cabinet without looking up from his work.


The Doctor had taken off his tweed jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves.  He was wearing a long "Kiss the Cook" apron. He had put it on inside out, but Amy could still read the words backwards through the material.

Rory had rolled up his plaid shirt sleeves, and had tucked a tea towel into the waistband of his jeans.

Amy was the only one without an apron.  She'd changed into a pair of comfortable sweats before coming to the kitchen. She was up to her elbows in sticky flour, she looked at her two gorgeous men.  She and her boys.  She grinned.  Her domestic boys.


Rory hadn't been able to find everything he needed to make plum pudding.  Once he explained the problem to the Doctor, the Doctor took him over to the "temporal garden" and showed him how to program up whatever he needed.  It was a surreal experience to grow a whole tree in a few seconds just for a handful of fruit. 

Then the Doctor showed him how to process them.  Things could be hulled, seeded, chopped and dried at the push of a button.  Rory accidentally hulled and dried the nuts, ending up with shriveled little things and had to regrow the tree and rehull the nuts all over again.  Who knew there was so much work involved in raisins and prunes?

Rory watched the tree as it crumbled back into compost.  "Are you sure this is real, Doctor?" Rory asked, drawing the Doctor's attention from the stuffing he was preparing. "That's not just some time elapsed photography to trick us so we'll except reconstituted food it it?"

"No, Rory, it's real."

"You mean there's a whole tree in there? What, is it attached to some big room behind the wall?" he asked.

The Doctor dried his hands on his apron. "No. The temporal garden is dimensionally transcendental, like the Tardis. That's the whole unit." He nodded at the machine that looked like nothing so much as a large microwave.

"You mean there's an actual tiny tree in there?" Rory asked.

"Yes," the Doctor said.  "Relatively speaking."


There was a huge array of odd, complicated looking cooking devices in the kitchen, along with the drawers full of more normal cutlery. Amy and Rory avoided what they didn't understand, but Rory noticed that even the Doctor tended to prefer the simpler tools.  He used a knife to chop up his herbs, and used his hands to mix the stuffing. Although he did wave his hands under an arc shaped device that cleaned his hands with a wavering forcefield instead of water.  It even cleaned under his fingernails.

With some of the Doctor's kitchen "timers," a cabinet looking device, what would have normally taken hours, aging Rory's pudding or raising Amy's bread, only took moments.

While waiting on her dough to rise, Amy took care of the vegetables. Rory showed her how to program the garden, and they sat at the old, scarred kitchen table and snapped green beans and peeled potatoes, trading anecdotes with the Doctor about past Christmases (some of his were truly unbelievable. The Titanic indeed.)

Once the dough was done, Amy got up to shape her loaves while Rory went to check on his cranberry sauce (some things worked better without any timey-wimey cooking.)

The Tardis kitchen, like all good, old-fashioned kitchens, had a marble slab built into the countertop specifically for working chilled dough and pastry. Amy divided the dough into thirds and rolled the balls out into long tails. She pressed the tops together, laid out the rolls side by side and started braiding them.

"You're good at that," the Doctor said.

"Told you," Amy said smugly. She transferred the first braid into a greased loaf pan she'd prepared earlier. She started on the second braid and the Doctor reached around her to pull a little crock of spices out of the cupboard by her head. She shifted aside to give him room and bumped hips with Rory who was stirring cranberry sauce at the heater on the adjacent counter.

"Is it my imagination," Amy asked.  "Or is this kitchen getting smaller?"

The Doctor and Rory both looked up from their work and looked around.  "I don't think it's a matter of too many cooks this time," Rory said. All the cabinets and tables were still there, but now what had been a spacious manor kitchen had been reduced to the size of a small apartment kitchen.  They were practically standing on each other's feet as they prepared bread, and turkey, and pudding at different counters

"Seems like the Tardis is getting into the spirit of things," the Doctor said.  He jumped up on the counter, ripped open a cupboard and started shoving the contents aside.

"Hey!  Watch the bread!"  Amy said, throwing a tea towel over her bread to protect it.

The Doctor started patting down his pockets.  He realized he wasn't wearing his jacket.

"Rory!" he turned.

Rory had already anticipated him, he tossed the Doctor his sonic screwdriver.

The Doctor dived his head back into the cabinet, he worked on something in the back wall.  There was the clink of jars and the buzz of the screwdriver, and odd flickering lights shone out the cabinet doors.  "Come on, old girl," the Doctor coaxed.  "Give us a little room to breathe."

A soft breeze blew through the kitchen, mingling the sense of cranberries, plums and yeast.

Amy grabbed hold of the counter, dizzy, as the room suddenly stretched back out, like some trick of photography.

"Whoa!"  Rory said behind them as he stumbled and flicked them with bits of cranberry sauce from his stirring spoon.

The Doctor jumped down off the counter. He wiped a red speck off his pantleg and licked his finger. "Mmm!"  Fortunately it wasn't hot enough to burn. He picked up the tea towel and plucked a squishy cranberry out of Amy's hair.

"Thanks," she said, rubbing another splotch off of her nose with her flour covered arm.

"Sorry 'bout that," Rory said.  "She's not going to be doing anything else like that is she?"

"Dunno," the Doctor said. "The relative dimensional stabilizers can sometimes slip, especially the deeper you go into the Tardis.  I've been meaning to look at them.  Neither of us are as young as we used to be."  He patted the countertop fondly.  "But that's for another day!  Rory, have you got the pepper over there?"

Rory tossed him the pottery pepper shaker and the Doctor slipped the sonic screwdriver in his hip pocket and turned back to seasoning the potatoes.


"Green beans, peas, asparagus.  I think we've got the greens covered," the Doctor said.  "Cranberry sauce, plum pudding, (with brandy butter!  Yum!)  brioche, butter, potatoes, turkey and stuffing, nuts and fudge (Amy had had to threaten him with the spoon to keep his fingers out of the fudge while she was cooking it.)

"Are we missing anything?" the Doctor asked.

"Brussels sprouts!"  Rory suddenly exclaimed.

"Ugh!  I hate Brussels sprouts!" the Doctor said.


Amy and Rory put the last of the dirty dishes into the dish restorer (apparently it didn't wash the dishes, it just restored them to a pre-dirty state). She passed her hands under the cleanser, and automatically wiped them on her tea towel as she turned to survey the kitchen table. With the Brussels sprouts added (Rory had suggested carrots too, but the Doctor absolutely refused) the old trestle table was groaning under the weight of their feast.

"That's an awful lot of food for just the three of us," Rory observed.

"Oh, no problem, the more the better. We can put any extra in the nullards and eat it whenever we want," the Doctor said, beaming with satisfaction at the crowded table.

"Nullards?" Amy said. It sounded like a particularly adolescent insult.

The Doctor waved his hand at the walls, "Null cupboards. They'll keep the food in stasis until we need it."

"Right then," Amy yawned hugely, cracking her jaw. She rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. "We better put it up then."

The Doctor saw Rory stifle a yawn too. It had been a long day. The Doctor shook his head.  "I'll time-lock the kitchen. It'll wait." He clapped his hands and shooed the two of them out of the room ahead of him.   

"Right now it's time for all good humans to be in bed."