One year I was having thanksgiving at my house. I asked my sister to bring mashed potatoes, she brought a bag of potatoes. Even better, when my mom peeled the potatoes, she tried to put the peels down my garbage disposal. My husband spent thanksgiving dinner, cleaning up the drains, up to his elbows in potato peels.
I asked my sister in law to bring jello and she bought a premade jello salad because she didn’t know how to make jello. Which is fine, but I thought that everyone would know how to make jello. And jello was always on the menu. It was one of the few things her kids would eat besides the rolls.
And then there was the Christmas that my oven broke and my prime rib roast took hours and hours. Needed a new burner but not something that can be done on Christmas Eve.
What are your (now funny) mishaps with thanksgiving dinner?
The very first holiday we hosted as newlyweds saw the guest bathroom toilet needing an emergency plumbing visit and the dishwasher flooding the kitchen. Pretty much a disaster…definitely didn’t think it was funny then but we do laugh about it now.
One year my MIL hosted and asked everyone to bring a certain side dish. My SIL was tasked with green beans for the dinner. She always errs on the side of, “less is more”, but I have yet to see this work out. When she uncovered her dish, we could count the green beans at a glance. There were at least 10 of us and I think we were all apportioned 4 beans. To this day my MIL will say when assigning someone the green beans, “And please bring more than 12 green beans!”
You can’t put potato peels in a garbage disposal?! (I wouldn’t know I compost all my vegetables.)
Not really funny, but I do have fond memories of making Thanksgiving dinner in Germany. It was not of course a holiday, but I think I always managed to cook it on the Thursday and to have a few guests. There was only one place in Munich at the time that sold Turkeys. Pumpkins and yams and pecans were all non-existent and I tried many substitutes. Now I wonder why I didn’t just make apple pie.
Not on Thanksgiving (might have been Easter!) I can vouch for potato peels in quantity NOT being ok to go down the disposal! And it was me who did it. I had done peels down it before- maybe from a few potatoes. But potatoes for lots of people? That’s a no-no! My brother and husband spend a couple hours heads under the sink cleaning my mess up!
First time I fried a turkey I didn’t want to be bothered with the directions and didn’t account for the bubbling up after oil displacement. Almost had to kick the whole thing over into the pool as the grease fire was pretty concerning. Spilled so much oil on the patio it took weeks to clean it off.
Since then we do three small birds instead of one big one. Got it down to a science now…
Not Thanksgiving related but this reminds of the time we were in Zurich years ago at a restaurant. The waitress spoke very little English and we spoke even less German. She was trying to tell us a bout a special and described it as a big bird. My husband ordered it thinking it would be turkey. It was actually ostrich. Very tasty but nothing like turkey.
Oh dear, the year we met DIL’s mom for the first time as she and her son and his gf, now wife, were with us for Thanksgiving. We use a roaster for the turkey and dh didn’t notice that it has tripped a circuit and the power was off. Ugh. Dinner two hours late and the son’s gf had to miss because she had to go to work…Thanksgiving retail hell. But…we persisted.
years ago, for some reason my father decided to read from the Bible right before he carved the turkey. He opened it up randomly, and started reading all about the blood sacrifices of animals. The rest of us were all looking around at each other like “WHAT?!” – it was bizarre !
My SIL and BIL are kind of flaky, so I figured it would be safe to have them bring the pumpkin pie for thanksgiving dinner. They showed up with what I think may have been a strawberry pie they got at a neighborhood pie exchange. I say it may have been because all I saw was some red gelatinous goo with spattered whipped cream. No strawberries in sight. It looked like it had been dropped. That was the year of no pumpkin pie.
The year we got our boat, H decided to take our older kids and some of our guests out for a ride while the turkey was cooking. He is the family chef. Anyway, something went wrong and H, 4 of my kids, my best friend’s H and their 2 kids and my SIL’s then boyfriend wound up stranded when the engine died. It was 2001 and cell phones were not as ubiquitous as they are now so nobody out there had one. I eventually remembered that we had a ship to shore walkie talkie thing, but it didn’t work in the house. I was outside in the street trying to hail them down as my neighbors peeked out their windows wondering about the crazy woman ranting in the road. Eventually, I reached the Coast Guard, which went out and rescued them. The turkey was burnt by the time they got home, so we had Chinese food and side dishes. Funny, my friends went somewhere else the next year.
Not a story about a dinner fail, but epically hysterical:
About eight years ago I went through a phase where I was doing headstands as part of my exercise routine. I was staying with my son and exercised in the attic, which was small and had a very peaked ceiling. Of course when I did my headstand I fell over, and my butt poked a big hole in the slanted wall. I apologized to son and we agreed I’d get that fixed eventually.
About six months later, we were having Thanksgiving dinner at son’s house. His fiance was there, as were my other son and his GF. Son and GF were sleeping in the attic and complained that it was cold up there. We all realized that there was no heat source in the attic – except, the fiance said, “for the hot air coming out of your mom’s butthole.” There was deadly silence for about five seconds. What in the world was she saying?!! She finally sputtered, “No, I meant the hole in the wall in the attic!”
One Thanksgiving at my in-laws the stove broke. This was about halfway through the turkey cooking. It just stopped working and wouldn’t get hot at all. Most of the sides were already made and we were able to reheat in the microwave or on the stovetop. We finished cooking the turkey outside on the propane BBQ. To be honest, it wasn’t cooked all the way through - hard to get something that big cooked on a BBQ grill. I sort of saved the day by making the BBQ suggestion.
Thanksgiving several years ago at my sister’s. My mother arrived with treats for sister’s dog. Dog got so excited, frantically wagging her tail. Hit the end of her tail on the door, broke and cut the tail. She kept wagging her tail. I heard screams, came running into the white kitchen, and there is blood everywhere. It’s all over the floor, cabinets, counters; it looked like a murder scene. Needless to say, dinner was delayed while the dog had emergency surgery and we cleaned up the kitchen.
A total nerd story, but true: A group of physicists in Britain (while I was there) were trying to roast a turkey. Their turkey did not come with instructions on the plastic wrapper. In fact, I don’t believe that it was wrapped in plastic at all, as many of the turkeys sold in American supermarkets are. No one owned a cookbook. Because, physicists! There was at that time no internet. What to do? So they modeled the turkey as a spherical ball of water, and figured out what time would be required to raise the center to 180 or 190 F. The turkey came out exceedingly under-done and dinner had to be delayed by quite a lot!
I believe that the principal source of error in the estimate involved neglecting the heat of evaporation of water.
My BIL was single and just out of college, and offered to make the turkey for TG dinner. He took the frozen bird out TG morning, popped it in the oven and wondered why it wasn’t cooked four hours later like the directions said. And because the bird was frozen, he didn’t know about/remove the giblets.
He is now THE expert in the family on making good turkey.
When we used to go to DH’s parents for TG, he, BIL and I had a quiet tradition of leaving shortly after dinner, ostensibly for shopping. We actually went to a nearby Westchester diner. His parents were incapable of preparing food, and wouldn’t let us do it, so we would consume as little as possible there. DH’s dad once served a raw turkey. Said 1.5 hours in the oven was plenty. The darned bird was bloody.
