Inside Duke Medicine
Share your Turkey Day disasters
posted November 10th, 2008
The bird burned. The in-laws showed up early. The dog ate the ham. The oven broke. Mary and John announced their divorce.
Most of us have a lot to be thankful for come Thanksgiving Day. But sometimes we’re most grateful for simply surviving the surprises.
Inside Online wants you to share your Turkey Day disasters—especially those that went humorously awry and, more or less, had a happy ending.
Just click on “comments” below.
Comments
One of my specialties is made-from-scratch lemon mirangue pie. One year I had slaved (it felt like it anyway) preparing 2 of them to take to our family TG gathering. I drove, my husband held the pies. Well, he decides we have to make a stop on the way. He gets out - placing the pies in the seat. No sooner was the car door shut than our large labrador retriever (which my husband insisted on bringing) jumped into the front seat and promptly sat on my precious pies! My husband came back to the car to find me in tears - saw what had happened and busted out laughing. It wasn’t funny to me at the time, but now, I laugh about it too. We did have other desserts. And since the pies were covered, they were only squashed not dirty, so a few brave souls dug in with spoons anyway.
During our kitchen renovation many years ago, we purchased a new oven which became operational the day before Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving Day, I turned on the oven for the first time, inserted the turkey and then began exploring the new stove’s buttons and latches. The latch called “oven lock” just above the oven door seemed like a premium safety feature to keep little fingers from opening a very hot oven so I moved the oven latch to the on position. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I had actually started the oven’s self cleaning cycle and oven temperature was zooming up to 500 degrees! After trying desperately to open the oven without success, I called Westinghouse appliance hotline only to find that they also had the day off. An hour later in desperation I unplugged the oven and was able to remove the turkey after the temperature came down enough to stop the cleaning cycle. Our turkey wasn’t burned but it was very dry. We were able to eat our Thanksgiving Day turkey much sooner than we anticipated!
My Aunt Margaret had recently undergone treatment for cancer and this particular Thanksgiving was going to be her return as Queen of her kitchen. She had been used to wearing turbans or nothing at all on her head that was barely covered with peachfuzz. There were lots of family over and she wanted to be proper so she sported her new wig…..it was not real hair but synthetic. She opened the gas oven set on 500 degrees broil, leaned over to take out the casserole….you get the picture…..She was now sporting melted synthetic helmet hair….it was quite a site…we laughed so hard that we cried…it made for a memorable Thanksgiving.
I can remember when I was just 16 years old and we lived in HoneyBrook, Pa. We had great neighbors and one of them who lived across the street from us was a minister and his wife, who my mom was very close to her. They were best of friends. Well, it was the day before Thanksgiving and Martha (who was also a preacher’s wife and mom’s best friend) came over in a tizzy and mom asked her what was wrong and she said, “Les, my turkey is still frozen and I’m not sure what to do.” My mother (just joking ) said, “Martha, just throw it in your washer and let it run. It’ll defrost.” The next day (Thanksgiving) Martha comes over and says, “Les, thanks so much for your advice. That was the best tasting turkey we ever had.” Well, mom forgot she told her to do that because she figured Martha knew she was joking, so mom said, “Martha what are you talking about?” Martha said, “I did what you told me to. I put it in the washer and it defrosted and stuffed it and threw it in the oven.” I thought mom was going to pass out right there. We were all laughing so hard and mom said, “Martha, I didn’t think you took me seriously,” and she said, “Well, I did and I thank you for it.” Thank goodness it turned out the way it did. We will never forget it. True Story
The year of two Thanksgivings:
Two years ago we had two Thanksgiving dinners at our house. The original plan was to have one on Thanksgiving Day that included myself and my husband, a dear friend of ours and her family, and another friend of ours (count ‘em, 7 people-totally manageable). Well, my dear friend then asked if another friend of hers, who was here from out of town, could join us since she had no one to share the day with. I said, sure, the more the merrier! (Now 8) The second Turkey Day was to be on that Saturday so that we could share a meal with our daughter and her husband who were in from Florida and had to spend Thanksgiving Day with his family. So that would have been 4 for that meal, a small dinner for sure.
Then, things started to happen. My dear friend’s step father became very ill in New York City so she and her family went there for Thanksgiving. Her friend, whom I had met only once, still wanted to come to our house on Thanksgiving Day, so I had to still prepare all the “fixins” and entertain an “almost” perfect stranger (it all turned out great though!). So that left 4 of us for Thanksgiving Day. Then my friend who had gone to NYC said that they would be back on Saturday, could they still come then? I said sure—that made 8 of us on Saturday, and another big turkey with all the fixins! Needless to say we had alot of leftover turkey.
Now that I think about it—Thanksgivings are unusual at our house. There was the year that we found out that friends of ours were flying back from Florida on Thanksgiving Day after her father’s funeral and so while I was preparing our meal, my husband went to the store, got another turkey and more food and we fixed another Turkey dinner to take to their house.
For us, being far away from family over the years and only being able to share Thanksgiving Day with them occasionally, we have always managed to join with friends and friends of friends, and been very thankful for the opportunity to share the day and the meal with them!
As a vegetarian I thought I would try a Tofurkey holiday roll as a main course. Unfortunately being 12 weeks pregnant and the odor of that thing ruined the whole day. My mother in law and husband had thanksgiving without me, and I made them put all the leftovers outside.
I think most people would agree turkey can be fairly dry - not counting the gravy bath that most people use after-the-fact. Anyway, a number of years ago, my wife and I decided to try something radically different from the norm and brine the turkey, and we’ve been doing it this way ever since. Yes, it takes quite a bit of preparation and time, but the result is nothing short of heavenly. In fact, the bird is so deliciously moist that the dark meat can just fall right off the bone.
Since our Thanksgiving gathering is fairly large, I will buy the biggest bird that I can find. Last year was a 26lb monster, but I digress. Here’s the deal: to brine a large turkey properly, you have to add almost 4-5 gallons of liquid and other spices, etc… and you have to make sure that the bird stays cold during the brining process. Needless to say, you need a very large amount of space in your fridge in order to do this, but problem was, we didn’t have a large amount of space. I didn’t think that far on our first attempt. We normally do Thanksgiving lunch, and since the bird needs to brine for 6-8 hours before cooking, the best time to brine is overnight. Aha! I thought. It’s cold outside, why not put the bird on the deck? Seemed like a very rational idea at the time, so I checked out all the local weather forecasts to make sure that it would be cold enough for proper food safety. Certain that this would be ideal, I proceeded to convince my wife that I knew what I was doing. Yeah, bad idea.
Imagine my surprise at 4:00am, when I went to flip the turkey over in the brine, that the sky was full of stars. Why was that such a big deal? Well, according to the forecast gurus, the heavy cloud-cover that night would keep the temps from plummeting below 30 degrees. In other words, no clouds meant that the temps had dropped into the low-teens, and that my big, beautiful, brined bird had just spent the last 6 hours in basically an outside freezer, undoing all my hard work and majorly delaying our lunchtime plans.
We were able to salvage the turkey, so all wasn’t lost. But I often wonder what would have happened had I not decided to go out at 4am that night and adjust the turkey. I guess we would have woken up the next day with a big frozen turkey bowling ball.
My absolute worst day was the first time i tried to do the entire meal by myself. I washed out the inside of the turkey, but, did not know there were “things” inside. Out comes the stuffing and the “things” as a surprise. I forgot to get the the cranberries and the fruit salad out of the refrigerator.
I was having a drink with the first guest to arrive and got up to answer the door and my dachschund finished off the Irish Creme that I had been sipping. She was very quiet for the rest of the day.
Thank goodness there was enough edible food that made it to the table and my guest were very understanding!
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