T-DAY DISASTERS?
Sometimes despite our best efforts, Thanksgiving dinner goes awry.
The Bruce family has been exploring Texas and getting adjusted to their new traveling lifestyle. They’ve particularly enjoyed swimming and river floating activities. Nichole reports that the homeschooling took a bit of tweaking at first. The hardest part is that the youngest, Beckett, is too young to sit and color during school hours. Also, lessons that are appropriate for the older are too advanced for Zoey. But Nichole is enjoying teaching the children and watching them learn and improve each day. The kids like the fact that school is only about 4 hours.
The best part of all is that the kids play together, and fighting is almost nonexistent. They’ve visited state parks, The Alamo and enjoyed the local history of New Braunfels. They will move to Gulf Shores, Alabama, this week for a new chapter. They don’t have specific Thanksgiving plans yet.
As I prepared the Thanksgiving menu this year, the ghosts of Thanksgivings past rose up from their graves and grinned at me.
One of the ugliest was the second Thanksgiving in the first home we owned. It was a little place that needed a lot of work before it was comfortably livable. By our second Thanksgiving there, our No. 4 child was 15 months old, but I wanted to host my in-laws.
The problem was that I had one small oven, and nobody lived close enough to bring hot food.
My foodie friend, Richard Pike, praised the method of barbecuing the bird. He described the moist, succulent meat, falling off the bone in smoky slabs of deliciousness. “The only thing you have to do is make your gravy separately. The meat tastes fantastic with the smoky flavor, but it ruins the gravy,” he said.
He gave me careful instructions in placing the coals in the new barbecue my in-laws had given us for Christmas the year before. I followed instructions precisely, basting, turning and replenishing the coals.
In the meantime, I followed a tight schedule for all the side dishes taking turns in the oven, with the rolls last of all. Nothing is better than rolls steaming in a basket just as the blessing is asked.
The meal preparation ticked along like a wellgreased machine. Green bean casserole, sweet potatoes and apples, dressing, and as the turkey was ready to begin its post-roasting rest, I popped in the tall soft potato rolls.
The tables were set for 12. Jeff sliced into the turkey. Horrors! The meat was still quite pink! I rushed it back to the coals hoping that 30 minutes would transform the raw-looking meat.
But it was the same after half an hour and the half hour after that. I revved up the coals hot enough to roast Shadrack, Meshak and Abednego, but after an extra hour and a half, the meat was still pink.
The side dishes were cold. My mother-in-law suggested we go ahead without the turkey and so we reheated a few things a bit. By then, it had beentwo hours since the promised dinner-time.
I decided to carve the turkey and finish off the process with a bit of nuking in our new-to-us microwave.
When the turkey came from the microwave, dry as a desert and still pink, I realized that barbecuing poultry leaves the meat pink, even when it’s thoroughly cooked. And that turkey had been quite cooked fortwo hours.
It was a much bigger failure to me than to our guests. We all laughed about it, and several confessed that the turkey is their least favorite part of the meal anyway. That year, it was everybody’s least favorite, no doubt.
Another year, I went a little crazy baking pies. The day before Thanksgiving, I let everybody choose their favorite and ended up with 11 pies. There were onlynine in the family, but the pumpkin recipe makes two and the razzleberry makes 3. So my oven was on for the entire Wednesday before the holiday.
I rose early on Thanksgiving to stuff and inter the traditional tom in the roasting pan. But by 10a.m., I should have been smelling the turkey, and I wasn’t.
There’s nothing so hideous as raw turkey just two hours from mealtime. Turns out that the oven igniter had gone bad (on Thanksgiving of all times!). Happily, the broiler still worked and by clever manipulating, we tricked the oven into eventually doing its job.
We Americans have so many wonderful things to be thankful for. A blip or two in a feast or a disappointing day are nothing compared with the opportunities, comforts and peace we enjoy.
Only in America. God bless it!