Thanksgiving disasters
From Serious Eats
It’s our goal at Serious Eats to provide you with everything you need to have the most delicious, stress-free Thanksgiving humanly possible. But things don’t always go as planned. Sometimes, you end up at your crazy aunt’s house, who’s trying to shove a giant frozen turkey into the oven while ducking repeatedly into the basement bar for a little pick-me-up or three. Sometimes, your renegade brother-in-law insists on deep-frying the turkey by “intuition,” and then things go boom. And on some very special occasions, your teenage cousin sabotages the entire turkey with a bottle of rat poison moments after it’s been carved to protest turkey cruelty. It’s on those nights when you just have to say ‘screw it,’ and order in Chinese. We’ve all been there (right?).
PHOTO: Kenji Lopez-Alt
Comments:
steveholt
4:12PM ON 11/08/13
I’ll start this off…we had just built a house, and the build did not go that smoothly, The electrician was a complete moron so we had our share of electrical gremlins. It was about 3:30, and we had 35 people coming over at 4…and all the power goes out. I’m muther f’n the builder and the electrician, storming into the basement to check the breakers, it all looks ok. after about 10 minutes of this, we realize that the power is out in the neighborhood. we just left the turkey’s in the ovens and they were close enough that they kept cooking. we had to improvise a few things, but we ave gas cooktops and a gas grill. the power came back by 5 and we happily mowed down dinner!
vg30e
4:31PM ON 11/08/13
The time when my father decided to have the turkey done by “people he knew” who ran a Chinese restaurant.
Have you ever seen turkey chopped up into small cubes and arrive in those white trapezoidal boxes (like 10) and come with like 5 little plastic round containers of soy sauce?
thingstea
4:31PM ON 11/08/13
Easy. I have a SIL who is a wonderful, caring person and doesn’t know her way around a kitchen and could not care less. A few years ago she decided she would make the entire Thanksgiving dinner by herself. (nb We don’t let that happen anymore)
The simplest example I can give is watching her pour precut raw broccoli in a bowl which she topped with mozz shreds from a bag. The bowl went in the microwave until the cheese melted and then was served. Raw crunchy Broccoli with congealed shredded cheese. yum.
When I got home I weighed myself and I had lost 1.5 pounds at Thanksgiving dinner that year.
Teachertalk
5:34PM ON 11/08/13
In graduate school, my husband and I lived in a humble apartment near Columbia University (monthly rent then: $95. monthly rent now: $2100). I made an elaborate (for me at the time) Thanksgiving dinner for his parents, sister, and a couple of friends. The only problem: we had no heat or hot water. We wore our coats during dinner, and just piled pans, dishes, and glasses in the kitchen afterward (thankfully, we had a gas stove, so I was able to cook the meal!) I was waiting for the hot water to come back on before doing all the dishes. (no dishwasher, of course, where we could have hidden some of the mess!) It took me three days to figure out I could boil water and wash the dishes without the aid of a faucet. The heat and hot water didn’t come on for another two weeks!
JanelJ
5:50PM ON 11/08/13
Not that much of a disaster, but in college our oven didn’t work and our jerk landlord wouldn’t fix it so I took the turkey and dressing to a friends house to cook it. My roommate assured me he could handle making salad and mashed potatoes. When we got back with the turkey I said
“Oh, the potatoes look nice, what did you put in them?”
“Potatoes.”
“And?”
“Potatoes. What? They’re mashed potatoes, what else do you want?”
Fortunately it was easy to stir in a bit of butter and seasonings before we served them.
Another roommate once decided to decorate the house with a big basket of apples picked from the neighbor’s tree. She didn’t count on the apples being full of bugs that woke up in the warm house and started flying around the dinner table.
PacificKate
6:51PM ON 11/08/13
You know the age old “dog got the turkey” story? Yeah, that. She somehow managed to pull the turkey off the table without breaking a serving platter and got through a leg and a good part of a thigh before anyone caught her.
imwalkin
6:54PM ON 11/08/13
The year I volunteered to cook the turkey(s) for forty-some of my wife’s family and left the gizzards in their plastic bag inside of one of the birds.
Northofboston
7:04PM ON 11/08/13
I come from a mixed family – dogs and cats. They were in cahoots, because our cat thought he was a dog. hey, he was black and white, the same size as the two white mini poodles, and the same color as the two black labs. The 30+ lb, locally sourced (back in the 1970s) and utterly delicious turkey was resting on the kitchen island. The adults were enjoying an adult beverage or two, while the adolescents were in the basement playing pingpong. The cat, undoubtedly egged on by the dogs, leaped onto the island and batted the bird down toward his co-conspirators. The ensuing noise brought many humans into the kitchen, but not before the bird was missing a wing, a drumstick, and some very crispy skin ….Four very happy dogs, one very smug cat, and 22 non-germaphobe humans later, thanks were given all around for a delicious dinner and a wonderful family story!
canyr12
7:19PM ON 11/08/13
When I was still a kid, we went to my mom’s cousin’s house for Thanksgiving. Her husband is an enthusiastic and generally very good cook. That year there was a problem with thawing, and so the turkey was not in the oven long enough. Bill took the turkey out and let it rest before cutting into it, only to discover that the turkey was still raw inside. He wanted to throw it back in and let it keep cooking; my mother (an ICU nurse) wouldn’t let him. We ate side dishes and pie that year.
Doug/NY
8:15PM ON 11/08/13
Several years ago we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s home. We had a wonderful meal of whole lobster, clarified butter, perfectly prepared green beans and scalloped potatoes. As good as the meal was, it was not in anyway a Thanksgiving dinner – no turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, etc. For Thanksgiving, given my choice, I’d rather have overcooked turkey, boxed stuffing and canned cranberry sauce than the very best meal of any thing else.
mcwolfe
8:36PM ON 11/08/13
+1 to @imwalkin – married to husband #1 at the ripe old age of 23. Roasted my first turkey and left the giblets inside. The meal was made especially memorable by my husband plunging the knife in for the first dramatic cut and a huge plume of raw turkey and giblet juices basically spraying everyone in the dining room. Yes, memorable.
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