I know there is going to be a thread where people talk about their juicy turkeys, and apple pies that made the blind see and the deaf hear.
This is not that thread.
No, this is about what you threw away to hide any evidence that you tried to make it in the first place.
For me, it was the roasted garlic. I tried to roast some garlic for my mashed potatoes. Didn’t work out to well. I was supposed to end up with a paste like spread after using my brand new stick blender. What I got was, well, you know those clove cigarettes? Imagine if they had garlic cigarettes. Now imagine an ashtray full of garlic cigarettes butts and then blend that with some olive oil.
Nasty.
So instead I used some gouda cheese added to the potatoes. That worked.
So what did you scew up this year? It doesn’t have to be a food thing. If you walked around you in-laws with you fly open or something like that you can share that too.
Well, not a culinary failure, exactly, but an act of clumsiness. The Highwayman made a positively delicious cranberry punch. We all decided it needed vodka. So I measured out a jigger of Absolut in my cocktail glass and went to the fridge for the half-gallon container of punch.
Well, the bad news is, a pair of pants and a pitcher are both ruined (how I broke a plastic pitcher I will never know). The good news is, we had spare ingredients for another batch (and I didn’t spill the vodka).
My turkey always comes out tender and juicy, with nice crisp skin. Only this year I had a Hungry Man turkey TV dinner. Not nearly as good as my turkey, but it was edible.
The reason my turkey always turns out well is because I cook it in a roasting bag. A bout three or four years ago my mom decided to try cooking the turkey that way. Only somehow she put the bird in the bag upside-down! No nice crispy breast skin on that bird! On the upside, I’ve never had juicier breast meat.
I tried my hand at helping out this thanksgiving. Well, I guess I was given an ultimatum anyways: Help, or you dont eat.
So, I tried to make some mashed sweet potatoes. The recipe called for oranges, sweet potatoes, milk, butter, and salt. I somehow put in way too many oranges, because the potatoes tasted more like you were eating a smooth, creamy orange than a potatoe. THEY all said it was tasty.
I just want my sweet potatoes back.
Everything was going very nicely, until I caught the cord of the electric mixer (just finished making perfect whipped potatoes) on the handle of a 2-cup pitcher containing turkey broth set aside for making gravy. All but few tablespoons went all over the counter and the floor.
Taking the cranberry ginger relish out of the refrigerator I slopped about a half cup of it – onto the floor.
Fortunately, I had more turkey broth, but when pouring the gravy from the pan into the gravy pitcher, you guessed it, about a cup or so onto the stove and – of course – the floor.
And then my hollandaise sauce curdled.
At least the dining room looked perfect. Until I spilled some more of the cranberry relish onto the clean white tablecloth.
On the good side, people wondered if I had bought the pies – one pumpkin maple pecan and one apple – because they looked so perfect. They were better than perfect; they had a nice flakey homemade crust.
I do love cooking for holiday dinners. Too bad I’m such a klutz.
Well, there was the year I didn’t know they had TWO bags in the turkey. I had pulled out one before roasting it, and well…let’s just say while I was alone in the kitchen carving the turkey, I had a little surprise waiting for me.
My favorite was my horrendous yuppie cousin who threw a Thanksgiving bash designed to give Martha Stewart hives.
No lie, all the ‘guests’ (i.e. hapless family) were informed of the dress code expected for The Bash. Most of us are pretty couth overall, but this one involved dictatorial e-mails about ties for men, women in dresses–preferably 3/4 length–as it was an early-evening Bash, etc. We were allowed to drift into admire her designer kitchen and her checklists–down the half-hour, stretching back a week to purchase exotic ingredients, just in case we missed the point of her ‘hospitality’, though The Dining Room was off limits until the stately Edwardian procession to table.
Right on schedule, she warmed the imported Italian platter and bore it off, then ruthlessly herded the extras, er, guests, onto their marks. She threw open the doors of her exquisitely decorated dining room…
…to find her Persian cat rolling and purring in demented bliss, slam in the middle of the warmed Italian platter.
Our turkey (our first ever attempt, it came out great) leaked all over the floor while we were carving it, which was embarrassing. It’d been given a lot of rest time too. Will have to carve it in a pan or something next year instead of on a cutting board.
I was making home-made vanilla icecream but sort of had a chemistry mishap, what with totally blanking on the concept that the more yummy white chocolate liqueur I added, the less easily the whole thing would freeze. Ended up with “Vanilla and White Chocolate Semifreddo.” which went down OK, but wasn’t what I’d been shooting for.
Oh and I had a small kitchen melt-down over the cheese straws because the pastry just wouldn’t come together. Fortunately I got that sorted and there was enough left over to make mini-quiches when I realized that as usual we’d forgotten to defrost the filo I was going to use for other appetizers.
Last year I was following Alton Brown’s Good Eats recipe for brining a turkey. When you first put the turkey in the oven, you set the oven for 500[sup]o[/sup] for 30 minutes. This is to sear the skin to the nice golden brown, then you cover the breast with tin foil, lower the temperature, and finish cooking.
Well, 500[sup]o[/sup] is about as hot as you can get without setting the oven to “Clean” and instead of roasting turkey, the horrid smell of burning bits and pieces of food that dripped to the bottom of the oven wafted through the house.
No harm done, the turkey turned out delicious, but I did frighten my guests when I had to open all the windows and turn on all the fans to get the smoke out of the house.
So, being the adventurous type, I decided to fry ducks, turkeys being overkill for 2 people, for the first time.
Got everything set up and lit off the burner to start heating the oil. Three hours and 15 minues later, the wind was howling so bad that I could not get the oil hot enough to cook in. Only made it to 290 and we needed 350.
By this time we are starved, so we had leftover lamb and the side dishes my wife had prepared. We got full, but not on what we wanted. Going to try the ducks again tomorrow, when the forecast is for calmer weather.
Not this year but many, many years ago when I was young we had a mouse problem in our house. We’d had the exterminator out and he’d laid traps and poison to kill the little critters.
Unbeknownst to us a mouse had taken its final breath beneath the oven. On Thanksgiving morning we popped the turkey in the oven. It was a big one and needed to cook for a long, long time. You could smell the delicious turkey cooking but there was that other smell, what was that?
Throughout the day the smell of turkey roasting got stronger but so did that other smell, the smell of decomposing mouse.
By the time the turkey was done the stench was overpowering. We pulled the out the oven and found the poor dead little mousy.
The turkey might have been good. I don’t remember. None of us really had any appetite by then.
The Dougs had precious little chance to screw up this TG, as we were guests of our dear friends the Winsors. They said, “Bring wine.” This is where we screwed up:We did. For eight people. Four bottles. None were even opened. Only some room-temperature Italian white was passed (and brother, it tasted passed!) before dinner. In fact, since Uncle Arnie is a reformed stoner and another guest is in AA, there wasn’t any wine at all during dinner.
OTOH, Papa Doug’s Savory Cauliflower Bake was a big hit and we all basically had a swell time. Except the cat, who hates being petted by strangers, because Mr. Winsor has developed the well-meaning but uncouth habit of crushing the li’l kitty head in the palm of his large hand.
Last year, we also followed Alton Brown’s turkey brining recipe, but we had trouble on the grill–we couldn’t get the breast temperature to rise above 110 degrees. We had it on the grill for a long time–then, we realized my industrious four year-old budding engineer had switched the electronic temperature probe to Celsius from Fahrenheit. The drumsticks were so burnt, they just crumbled when they were touched. However, because of the brining, we still had edible bird, even thought it was cooked at the ridiculously high temperature. This year, Alton’s guidance gave us a fabulous bird.
The other incident occurred about 10 years ago. It is referred to in my household (primarily by me) as “The Yam Incident”, and I am not allowed to speak of it publicly.
My mom had the worst mishap evah. Something squirted on the lightbulb in the oven and it exploded, ruining the turkey and three side dishes she had in the oven.
