Thanksgiving can be an exciting day. One fellow wanted roasted chestnuts, so he set his oven to 400 degrees, as he had been told, and his timer for 15 minutes, again as he had been told. Then he put the nuts on a tray, as he had been told, and started to roast them.
What he had not been told, of course, is that you have to put a hole in the flat side of the shell, traditionally by making an X with the tip of a sharp knife, because chestnuts have a fair amount of water in them.
After the second explosion, he opened the oven door, then he and his guests had to run for their lives. The only real casualties were a pair of water glasses.
Of course, you have to remember to buy a turkey in time, and if its frozen, find a way to keep it until its ready to cook. One family had this problem solved for them when they found a wild turkey drowned in their swimming pool on Thanksgiving Day morning. I won’t tell you whether they served it, but it was a nice-sized bird.
One year, I wanted to share our Thanksgiving with a turkey that was wandering around our backyard, just so that I, a vegetarian, could honestly tell people that I’d had a turkey for Thanksgiving. I had to agree that the idea had some macabre aspects to it.
Keeping a frozen turkey can be a challenge because they’re pretty big. The Butterball Hotline, which people can call for cooking advice, tells of a Colorado woman who solved the problem by putting hers in a snowbank. Unfortunately, it snowed quite heavily the night before, and she couldn’t remember where it was. The hotline didn’t report if she found it before spring, but at least it proves that she didn’t have bears.
Longtime readers will remember a fellow in my lab who got a terrific deal on a turkey a month before the holiday, and decided to keep it in our lab’s big chest freezer. He took it out the night before, took it home and put it in his refrigerator. The next morning, everything in his refrigerator, including the butter, was frozen solid. Our lab freezer was 112 degrees below zero. I don’t think that bird thawed for weeks.
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It’s also important to get a bird that will fit into your oven. Another hotline story involves a man who bought a bird that wouldn’t fit into his pan. After several minutes talking to the hotline woman, he finally admitted that he had wrapped the turkey in a towel and stomped it repeatedly to break all the bones up and make the bird more pliable. It turned out to be difficult to carve.
The most dangerous Thanksgiving activity is deep frying a turkey. Every year, there are dozens of injuries and house fires as a result of this practice. Also, if you overcook it, it will shrink and appear as though it was cooked by headhunters. One fellow thought he’d done everything right, removed the turkey from the hot oil and left it to cool on his driveway. His in-laws ran over it with their car when they arrived.
And the most common mistake is to forget to take the plastic bag of giblets out of the turkey cavity before you stuff it. If the bag leaks air, the turkey will smell like plastic. If it doesn’t, it could turn your turkey into an hair trigger, dressing propelled rocket. In Philadelphia, one shot right out of the oven and on to the floor.
Of course, Thanksgiving is not about abusing food, at least it’s not supposed to be, and it’s not about perfection. It’s about being grateful that we live in a decent town, that our country has recovered to the extent that it has, that at least some of our friends are still there, and that our family, if we’re lucky enough to have one, still cares about us.
Happy thanksgiving to you. Don’t shop on Thursday.