An almost epic fail! I decided not to buy any cranberries because I thought I had a bag of frozen ones. Well, that bag turned out to have frozen cornus mas berries that I picked off our tree back at House1 before we sold it !! ? Oh well. Cornelian cherry sauce it was!
My family all live in close proximity, so we cook a little bit in each oven, then bring everything together about 3pm and eat. We had a large group text, but the messages were not going through, so we didn’t know what was going on with each other all afternoon. Then after we finished eating, all the messages started popping up. The message saying “Turkey is still in the oven”, came through at 9 pm. The message saying “Dinner might be closer to 4:30” came in a 2:30 AM. The funniest was a picture of a full bottle of gin that came through long after the gin had been used to make cocktails. We had a great Thanksgiving, but our phones were in a time machine.
Was it good?!
I had everything prepped and ready to go in oven. My husband was smoking the turkey outside in his smoker and I was just waiting until about an hour before it was done to stick all the side dishes in the oven. He started the turkey around noon and the plan was to eat around 5ish.
Around 2pm, he came inside and said that he needed to buy a replacement tray or something for the bottom of the smoker. Then a little while later, he says, “I can’t get the temperature in the smoker hot enough. The hole in the bottom is preventing me from getting the smoker to the right temperature.” So what does that mean? He had to finish the turkey in the oven. So I had to scramble to figure out how I’d get all the side dishes cooked, as well as roast my veggies. I completely forgot that the small “drawer” under my big oven is actually an oven and not a place for storing all my cookie sheets. I think I’ve only ever used it once, so wasn’t even sure it would work. Well, it did, thankfully, so I was able to put the stuffing and sweet potato casserole in there and then managed everything else in the big oven once the turkey came out to rest. But for a moment, I was ready to kill my husband.
It actually came out fantastic. Had enough of the smoky flavor but wonderfully moist.
My kids are small, we arrive at my in laws Wednesday night, many years ago. Thursday morning, we’re all up and my BIL/ DH are ready to start prepping the turkey for roasting, and they ask MIL where is the turkey, they can’t find it. In the car, she says. Backseat.
My DH is like, Mommmmm, why is the turkey in your car?
Because, she says, I forgot it was there when I went to work yesterday, but it’s okay, it’s all thawed.
They actually cooked it, but nobody would eat it.
Haha @greenbutton!
Obviously you live where’s it’s warm.
Keeping your food in the car in Michigan, it’s as cold as the refrigerator and a perfectly acceptable place to keep the turkey.
@MaineLonghorn ’s turkey might not even thaw left outside. Lol.
Our neighborhood skating pond isn’t even frozen!
Most years we don’t even buy ice for the coolers out on the porch because the fridge is never big enough. This year it was over 50 during the day so we got ice, but many years we don’t bother.
Lol.
Don’t know why Thanksgiving has such funny things that come up, besides the drunk uncles and political arguments. My family has a cabin in the mountains above Palm Springs and we went there every Thanksgiving. Totally off the grid before there was any kind of solar power. Propane stove and refrigerator, the turkey had to be kept in a cooler.
Of course the oven failed one year in the middle of cooking the turkey. There was no way my Dad was going to go without his turkey!! My Dad took the turkey and ‘broke in’ to another cabin (we knew the owners) and finished roasting the turkey in their oven. But catastrophe occurred when I was ‘helping’ my Dad carry the turkey back across the boulders and cactus. It rolled off the platter and right into a cactus bush. Perfectly speared!! It got back into our kitchen, washed off and we had to get the tweezers out and pull cacti prickliest out. It was served and we ate it, daggone it!!
Many years ago we invited a young colleague of my husband’s for Thanksgiving dinner since her family was far away. I barely knew her but always welcomed folks who, like us, were far from family. I got everything perfectly served in the dining room and was enjoying time with family and this young woman when she leaned over to me and whispered “ I think the cat has found the turkey”. I whipped my head around and sure enough, the cat was on the island counter and nibbling away. DH later performed surgery to my satisfaction to salvage some of the meat.
My MIL used to be a wonderful cook but later in life became a terrible one (under/over cooked, meat left out for hours, too much salt in stuff and I had to check everything for way beyond expiration date and mold and tell the kids if they should eat it - no I wasn’t a horrible DIL, she would literally hand us bread that was 50% green and juice with a rim of black mold round the top).
One year she’d done Mac cheese as a side as it was my daughter’s favorite. She took one bite and whispered I don’t like this Mom - I took a taste and it was so salty it was inedible. The whole meal was. We kind of pushed the food around pretending to eat then I said I was taking the kids to the store as a pretext for going to find something to eat. We ate and popped into the mall to buy something so it would look as if we’d been shopping. A baby fell out of a shopping cart into it’s head and stopped breathing and they were asking for someone who could do CPR. No one else volunteered so I ended up doing it (terrifying and nothing like the little plastic doll in class ?).
So her terrible food saved a baby’s life.
Oh-my-deity @swimcatsmom !
Just remembered a mishap our older son experienced one year. He was at school on the other side of the country and we all agreed to keep the pressure off by not having him (or younger brother when he ended up at a different west coast school) try to travel home over Thanksgiving. One of the profs hosted students at his place and son didn’t want to go empty-handed, so he made yeast rolls to bring.
The recipe we use calls for half the flour with the rest of the ingredients for a stirring step, then add remaining flour, knead, rise, form rolls, bake. He gets through to trying to form the rolls and ends up on the phone – “Oh, expletive, I forgot the second half of flour!!!” Since time was short, he forged ahead. Says they ended up really soft with tones of sourdough, and his experience served as a funny talking point at dinner.
So H and my parents both live in WI - and for many many years all of our vacation time was practically used up going to WI (from our homes in TX and later AL) for holidays and other occasions. It was supposed to change when they all retired, and somehow it didn’t, although my parents often stopped through our place on their way to FL.
After almost 15 years of marriage, we were having a baby, our first, due in Feb. So we were not traveling. Both sets of parents came for Thanksgiving. H and I had Thanksgiving all worked out, and both my mother and MIL wanted to take over the kitchen and we would not let them. We were hosting.
Tells some about different personalities and different generations. Plus MIL tends to be rather rough with things - she somehow likes clanging her pots in her stainless sink, and she was starting to do that in my ceramic sink! I had to literally hold her wrists and tell her to stop so she would not damage my sink. Another time my mother was wanting to turn on my double oven when I wasn’t in the kitchen, and she turned the wrong oven on - which had some pans in it (thankfully nothing flammable, but the kitchen stunk up a bit from the grease screen I use to use over the fry pan that was in that oven).
When DD2 hosted Thanksgiving last year, she did all the cooking (and did a marvelous job). We only did tasks she asked us to do. Her only complaint (which she brought up several times, including this Thanksgiving) is that she spent $200 on the food. She has a little way to go on ‘adulting’ - she also was making a very good professional salary. However she doesn’t like to spend her money on certain things.
For our first holidays together, I made a homemade Swiss bread called Zopf, which is braided. It takes effort. I did a marvelous job. My new H acted like it was nothing special. Never made it again!
Haha @SOSConcern. We always say that our D loves to spend our money but hates to spend her own.