Your best Thanksgiving cooking disaster stories

  • Thread starter Thread starter funnyyetsavvy
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
F

funnyyetsavvy

Guest
LOL

I know we’ve all got 'em

Like the time my grandpa said “pass the gravy” and my little brother couldn’t control the gravy boat, so it poured all over grandpa’s lap…:eek:

Or the time my grandma had a few too many martinis and roasted the turkey upside down!:rolleyes:

Or the time my mom worked all day on the meal, only to forget the yams in the oven-to be discovered long after dessert was served:D
 
I probably shouldn’t bother if it involves a homemade cheesecake for dinner at the in-laws.

Four years ago: whipped out my trusty Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe. Misread the amount of butter for the graham cracker crust, with the result being that I used WAY too much butter, which leaked out of the springform pan and scorched on the bottom of the oven. The smoke detectors went off, the cheesecake was ruined, and we ended up with store-bought pumpkin pie.

Two years ago: decided to make a plain cheesecake with strawberry topping. The topping was delicious, but it turns out that the cheesecake, which had looked perfectly set when I pulled it out of the oven and stuck a knife in, was in fact not totally baked in the center. We had to eat around the edges. 😊
 
Well, we don’t have Thanksgiving here, but there always was a ton of cooking and baking being done in the kitchen around Christmas. Our family had been growing larger with each passing year and so the traditional chocolate mousse that was a must have for every year, was getting larger by quantity, therefore making it difficult to beat. My brother (a carpenter), took one look at my mother and told her he’d be right back. He brought in his electrical drill and replaced the ‘bit’ at the end with a whisk.(don’t know how! 🤷) We were all standing around in awe as he placed this HUGE bowl onto the floor and well, started mixing! Lo and behold, we all got sprayed with mousse, but suffice to say there was still enough left for us all! It was sometime before we could regain our composure from ROLFing!!!:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
 
Well, I was prego with dd, and I cooked a turkey for the first time in our marriage…and in my life. I forgot to pull out the plastic baggy of turkey insides…and cooked it with it in the entire time. It didn’t ruin the turkey, but I imagine the turkey could have caught on fire, had it cooked maybe just 30 minutes more? :eek:

Another year, hubby cooked the turkey…and for some reason, the gravy/drippings were literally running out of the oven…like seeping out of the sides. We opened the oven, and the pan must have given way, and we didn’t put anything under it, inside the oven, in case that would happen. :rolleyes:

You know, Publix has for like $75, turkey already cooked, stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls, etc…already prepared and ready to go. Hubby and I are having company this year, and if things go wrong again, we are trying that option next year!!😃

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
This was Christmas, not Thanksgiving, but the story is still good, I’m sure.

We raised our own turkeys one year - about a dozen of them, and planned to have them butchered shortly before Christmas. We had orders for most of them, but we planned to keep one for Christmas and one for Easter for ourselves. There were seventeen of us for Christmas, so we chose the biggest turkey, Tom, to eat right away.

When the turkey came back from the butcher, he was a little bigger than we’d realized… Old Tom the turkey was 36 lbs! He weighed more than my youngest cousin at the time. :eek: Needless to say, he was much too big for the oven! We tried to figure out what to do about it, and ended up sawing poor Tom in half with a chainsaw so we could fit him in a roasting pan sideways. We had to stuff the space between the turkey and the pan with stuffing, because you can’t stuff half a turkey. We hauled the other half of the turkey over to my grandparents’ house to roast at the same time.

We must have eaten that turkey for weeks on end! Every year, we still talk about Tom the turkey and joke about raising another monster turkey for Christmas.
 
This didn’t happen to me , but I did hear the listener who called a radio program with an interesting problem. It was either 1971 or '72, about a week before Thanksgiving, and a young sounding woman called Jim White on KMOX Radio in St. Louis asking how to get the feather’s off the wild turkey her husband had shot. As the call continued, information was added:

The turkey was frozen.

The turkey had not been cleaned before going into the freezer.

The turkey had been in the freezer for about 6 months.

The turkey had been shot illegally, out of season.

The segment was replayed around Thanksgiving for a couple of years, if I recall correctly
 
well the worst i know wasnt us but a neighbor a few doors down. tey made the classic mistake of trying to deepfry a frozen turkey.

luckily noone was hurt and no houses burnt down.
 
Here are two I was witness to (you see a lot of weird stuff from behind the bakery counter!)
  1. About seven years ago, when I was working at a different Wal*Mart, the bakery counter was side by side with the deli counter. It was a 24-hour SuperCenter and at about 5:30 in the morning, this man comes in, disheveled, wearing a pajama shirt over rumpled jeans, slippers, no socks, hair on end, stubbly face… and he’s standing in front of the deli counter with this look of near despair on his face. Not sure of his intentions, the deli manager gave me the “stand by in case we need to call security” look and asked if he needed help.
The man stared at her pleadingly through bloodshot eyes and said, “Do you have ANY kind of cooked turkey that can be carved to look like a roasted Thanksgiving turkey?”

Well, we didn’t get the whole story, but either the turkey they had bought for the family feast had not been defrosted in time, or it had somehow gotten ruined. The deli manager apologized that we were out of the boxed Thanksgiving dinners (turkey, dressing, gravy, potatoes and rolls for $25) but she sold him three whole deli turkey breasts (two oven-roasted, one smoked) after slicing them about 3/8" thick with the skin still on. That and several packets of “just add water” turkey gravy sent him away with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. We did not have the heart to laugh… we just hoped that years later he and his wife would be able to laugh about it!
  1. A couple years ago, we had an assistant manager from Louisiana (different Wal*Mart) who had insisted on preparing a deep-fried turkey for the dinner they served for the associates who had to work on Thanksgiving. He was going to inject it with Cajun seasoning and he went on and on about how delicious it would be.
Fast forward–2 a.m., Thanksgiving morning. I went into the bakery cooler to pull out the racks of rolls and bread to start baking because I knew that the “Thanksgiving dinner committee” would be clamoring for the oven at 7 a.m. to cook the dinner and I saw a shopping basket with 5 turkeys (20+ pounds each) for the associates’ dinner.

They were still frozen–rock-solid.

I quickly called a manager and asked what was up with the turkeys. He said another manager was supposed to have taken them out of the freezer… two days ago. He came to investigate and turned pale when he saw the still-frozen turkeys. He tried submerging them in hot water in the deep sinks to thaw them (the boiling hot water turned tepid in less than five minutes!) He tried putting them in the oven on low for an hour (can you say “dry turkey”?) and he still needed a pick to try to get the “innards” package out. By this time, we had four other managers gathered, trying to come up with a way to quick-thaw the turkeys (especially the one to be deep-fried). One suggested trying to roast them on very low for a longer period of time… they got the stink-eye from me because I needed the oven to bake the bread we needed to sell for the holiday (take a wild guess how many dinner rolls we bake and sell on Thanksgiving?) and there was no way I was tying the oven up for six or seven hours to cook the turkeys!

When I left for the day (at 10 a.m., to our family’s dinner), the turkey dinner project had been aborted and a couple of hams and some sliced deli turkey… and fried chicken… had been substituted for the traditional turkey dinner. NOT sorry I missed it!
 
Just_wondering said:
This was Christmas, not Thanksgiving, but the story is still good, I’m sure.

We raised our own turkeys one year - about a dozen of them, and planned to have them butchered shortly before Christmas. We had orders for most of them, but we planned to keep one for Christmas and one for Easter for ourselves. There were seventeen of us for Christmas, so we chose the biggest turkey, Tom, to eat right away.

When the turkey came back from the butcher, he was a little bigger than we’d realized… Old Tom the turkey was 36 lbs! He weighed more than my youngest cousin at the time. :eek: Needless to say, he was much too big for the oven! We tried to figure out what to do about it, and ended up sawing poor Tom in half with a chainsaw so we could fit him in a roasting pan sideways. We had to stuff the space between the turkey and the pan with stuffing, because you can’t stuff half a turkey. We hauled the other half of the turkey over to my grandparents’ house to roast at the same time.

We must have eaten that turkey for weeks on end! Every year, we still talk about Tom the turkey and joke about raising another monster turkey for Christmas.
Click to expand...
😛 I can just see it!!!
 
Question - define roasting the turkey “upside down” - cooking a bird breast side down is a trick for keeping the breast meat moist. Your relative was a genius!
 
I can’t think of anything too awful. One year, when I was single and living alone, my boss gave us all a huge turkey for a Thanksgiving bonus. I don’t remember the poundage, but it sure filled my little oven.

I was on food stamps. My fridge was one of those old ones with a freezer that held one ice tray and one 10-oz package of vegetables.

I ate that turkey for weeks. It took me a few years to begin liking turkey again.

Then there was the New Year’s Eve that my little gas stove (same one as above) had a malfunction and blew my eyebrows off when I opened the oven door. The gas company actually sent someone out on New Year’s day!

I must have squeezed my eyes tight shut, because I still had my eyelashes. I’m glad I had my hair up! I got away with a few frizzies along my hairline.

God bless all of us, from the inept chefs to the Cordon Bleu’s!

Ruthie
 
A hot apple pie slid off the baking sheet into the bottom of the oven. One of my guests kindly said, “We’ll call it apple crisp, let’s eat!”

Of course, I had recently cleaned the oven. Never again will I do that right before a holiday.
 
Once upon a Thanksgiving, I decided it would be more festive to have goose instead of turkey. I invited people over for this festive meal.

I did not realize that goose has a high percentage of fat, and not a lot of meat. It cooks down a bit.

We also had canned ham, suddenly, and deli tray.
 
I love it! LOL!

I’m surprised we haven’t heard from Bama on this one!
 
colleague tells of her brothers who roast a pig and goat for a family holiday, don’t remember which one, but could be TG down here, and they dug a pit in the back yard, stayed up all night watching the meat, and drinking beer. They just could not get the wood fire to go down to coals, it just kept burning flames all the time. The meat was done to a crisp long before dawn, when somebody sobered up enough to realize they had cut into a gas line. that practice is now illegal in this town. can’t imagine why
 
puzzleannie said:
colleague tells of her brothers who roast a pig and goat for a family holiday, don’t remember which one, but could be TG down here, and they dug a pit in the back yard, stayed up all night watching the meat, and drinking beer. They just could not get the wood fire to go down to coals, it just kept burning flames all the time. The meat was done to a crisp long before dawn, when somebody sobered up enough to realize they had cut into a gas line. that practice is now illegal in this town. can’t imagine why
Click to expand...
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
I needed a good laugh tonight…ha! How funny! Not funny for the residents in the surrounding area…but, you tell it funny. lol
 
puzzleannie said:
colleague tells of her brothers who roast a pig and goat for a family holiday, don’t remember which one, but could be TG down here, and they dug a pit in the back yard, stayed up all night watching the meat, and drinking beer. They just could not get the wood fire to go down to coals, it just kept burning flames all the time. The meat was done to a crisp long before dawn, when somebody sobered up enough to realize they had cut into a gas line. that practice is now illegal in this town. can’t imagine why
Click to expand...
:rotfl:

I’m guessing that’s the last time those guys were asked to take care of the meat.
 
Scrappy was my DW’s beagle. She had him before we were married. He was such a handsome dog. His soul belonged to Satan, but he was good looking. One year before DW and I were married he ate the turkey. The whole thing. He was sicker than a devil dog for days on end. I wasn’t there for that one, so I am unsure of how that happened. But I was there for this one so I don’t doubt the stories about him.

We had gotten good at dog proofing the house before we left out for any length of time. Scrappy would get into everything; trash, cat food, cat box, anything remotely edible that wasn’t in a Houdini proof container that was then locked in the ice box or behind a dead bolt. DW had made 2 pecan pies for us to take over for Thanksgiving supper latter at friends. We needed to go for just a bit and did the usual dog proofing checks. Upon our return the Satanic Beast was looking ill and we were short 2 pecan pies. I don’t know how he got up there to get them.

You’d think that after a few serious barfing episodes you’d stop gorging yourself on anything you could get your paws on. Not this moron. Bad dog! Oh you’re so cute. BAD DOG!
 
we dog and house sat for a beagle like this,

he ate an entire pizza, box and all the first night we were there, in the time it took us to get sodas and ice from the kitchen

the had to literally lock him in a cage on holiday weekends because he would scrounge garbage cans–his favorite hobby–for turkey carcasses.

the last day we were there
he found a lipstick, they had a white carpet. you don’t need to hear the rest, lipstick has a base of grease that acts as a strong um colon cleanse.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top