Oven fires and cats in turkeys: Thanksgiving cooking disasters
We asked readers to share their horrific and hilarious stories of Thanksgiving meals gone awry and the results were as delicious as a golden-brown turkey (unlike the charred birds that featured in some readers’ tales). From exploding oven doors to critter encounters (raccoons, squirrels and one particularly ravenous Labrador puppy), your misadventures made for delightful cautionary tales and mysteries. (How did that dish towel wind up inside the main course?)
Here are some favorites.
■ Dinner was all ready, and the spread - Cornish hens and all the sides - was warming in the oven, said Lauren Krouse, a 30-year-old writer from Harrisonburg, Va. She and her husband were having a quiet holiday, just the two of them, when “for some reason, and we don’t know why, my husband flipped on the self-cleaning function.” The oven door locked, with their Thanksgiving feast inside. Frantic Googling ensued. They unplugged the oven, but still couldn’t get the stubborn beast’s door to open.
Coda: That oven door never did open. Even repairmen tried and failed. Eventually, they moved the stove, which had started to stink, onto the porch while they waited for a replacement. “I like to think that somewhere, in some landfill, our Thanksgiving dinner is still encased in that darn oven: a beautiful fossilized feast,” she said.
■ “I was in the living room watching football and we heard a loud BANG! in the kitchen. We all ran in expecting the worst, only to see our father standing there with a confused and slightly terrified look on his face,” wrote Andrew Billhardt of Chicago. “Apparently, he decided that he wanted to flavor the turkey drippings with bourbon; a little while later the bourbon ignited and blew the oven door off the hinges and sent it flying into the cabinets on the opposite side of the kitchen. He reattached the oven door and the turkey turned out fine, but we have never let him live it down.”
■ Diane Harlan of Portland, Ore., was helping her mother carve second helpings for their family dinner.
“We went into the kitchen and to our absolute horror, there was a black tail coming out of the turkey cavity,” she wrote. “We literally had to pull the cat out of the turkey by the tail and he was clawing like mad to stay right where he was. We got him out, but he was covered in turkey juice and the remnants of stuffing.”
■ “I kept putting the stuffing in the turkey. More and more. It was called stuffing,” wrote Lupe Morales of El Paso, describing her very first attempt at preparing turkey. “As we finished setting the table and making sure there was enough ice, I heard it. Pouff! Pouff! Then the smell. A small stream of smoke started to come out of the top of the stove. My beautiful turkey, slathered in five pounds of butter, was a little on fire! My turkey was exploding! The stuffing was shooting out and slamming into the sides of the oven! Stuffing everywhere. I had never witnessed such a display of culinary chaos in my life! I managed to clean the stove and salvage what was left of the exploding stuffing into a casserole dish. The dinner was tasty, and no one got salmonella.”
■ It didn’t take long for Kevin Rochlin, a now-retired engineer from Seattle, to settle on his game plan. As he had done in previous years, he had placed his turkey in a large stock pot to brine, and since the temperature was cold enough and his refrigerator not big enough, he secured the lid with twine and left it outside overnight to work its magic. One year, though, some marauding raccoons gnawed through the rope and helped themselves to the turkey that had bobbed to the surface. “It was surgically precise,” Rochlin said, confined to one drumstick. He quickly thought through his options, and decided on the easiest path. “I lopped off the leg, and no one was the wiser,” he said.
He kept the secret by carving the turkey first rather than presenting it whole, and his younger daughter only discovered it later in the evening when she overheard him discussing it with his wife. “She was horrified - she was like, ‘Dad, you could have killed us!’” he said. “The tale has been told for years after, as the two of us try to get family members to take our side on what should have been done,” he said. An epilogue? Both his daughters, he said, are now vegetarians.
■ “It was time to make the gravy,” wrote Melinda Bates of Woodstock, Va. But when she dumped some flour into the pan of turkey juices, “To my horror, I saw a bunch of little black bugs. It would be impossible to remove them individually. I took a quick look over to the living room, and no one was paying any attention to the kitchen. I picked up the pan and dumped the contents into my blender, added the water and turned it on. I figured the bugs were tiny enough to not impact the flavor and hopefully not poison the guests, so what they did not know would not hurt them. The mixture came out nice and smooth, and when poured back into the pan it cooked up into a delicious gravy that everyone enjoyed. My little secret. Until now.”
■ “At Thanksgiving dinner sometime in the 1940s,” wrote Lucy Davidson of Dawsonville, Ga., the turkey slipped off the platter and skidded across the floor. “My grandfather, as host, was unperturbed and instructed, ‘Bring in the other turkey.’ The wayward bird was retrieved and back inside the kitchen, discretely replated. Then, this ‘other’ turkey made an equally ceremonious but undramatic presentation to the table. For the remainder of his life, my father greeted any culinary or serving mishap with, ‘Bring in the other turkey.’”