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November 23, 2009

Cooks tell Thanksgiving disaster tales

By VANESSA McCRAY

TRAVERSE CITY -- It's one of the grandest culinary tests for the home cook, prepared and served under the watchful eyes of guests, involving multiple side-dishes, homemade pies and a challenging main entree.

Thanksgiving dinner is high stakes. There are no wrapped gifts to distract from a food fiasco. The meal is the main event. The traditional feast is anticipated for months, compared to other mothers' efforts and complex in its required courses.

The turkey poses the biggest threat to the meal's success. That wily bird must be thawed, cleaned, stuffed, trussed, basted, seasoned and roasted to golden perfection. There's bound to be mishaps. Readers offered these stories of Thanskgiving Day dinner disasters.

Dog-gone (ate) it

Jeri Papazian of Lake Ann didn't have enough storage space in her kitchen for a large turkey. So, she placed the tightly wrapped bird outside where the air was suitably chilled. On Thanksgiving Eve her guests started to arrive, but when Papazian opened the kitchen door to reveal the turkey's "clever perch" she discovered the bird was missing.

"I stood aghast," Papazian recalled. "What on earth happened to this 20-pound turkey? ... This was the next day's star entree."

It was already 10 p.m., and with no nearby stores or time to thaw out another frozen turkey, Papazian "began a bird hunt." Armed with flashlights, they found the turkey -- unharmed save for a few big bites and still wrapped.

Following the snowy tracks, Papazian determined "that the culprit wasn't at least a beast of questionable repute. It was a sweet neighborhood dog."

The group decided to give the turkey a good bath and convinced themselves the cooking temperature would kill any bacteria. They carved around the bite marks.

Short on refrigerator space during another Thanksgiving, Papazian placed a turkey in a box on the trunk of the car. She left for work at a dark hour, rounded a curve and checked her review mirror to see the turkey rolling away. A chase after the still-wrapped bird resulted in its recovery.

"We've learned our lesson," Papazian said. "The turkey is kept safe and secure in the kitchen."

Just desserts

Two readers remembered imperfect pumpkin pies, both brought down by a forgotten ingredient. No matter how pretty the crust is (even if it is decorated in dough-formed leaves), omitting the sugar is a recipe for disaster.

A little something extra

Joan Nachazel was a young wife and thrilled to use her lovely wedding gifts for Thanksgiving. She and her husband Frank were living in married housing at Michigan State University. They had invited a friendly couple to share the meal, and Nachazel had consulted by telephone with her mother on how to pull off the proper feast. She got out the nice dishes and the beautiful linens.

"I did everything that she said, and I was going to have it just like them," said Nachazel, who now lives locally.

She busied herself in the tiny kitchen, finished the meal and took off her apron. Her husband began to carve the turkey, untying the legs and removing the stuffing.

"And, he says, 'Something else is in here,'" Nachazel recalled. "He pulled out the package with all the liver and the whole nine yards sitting in there, wrapped in white meat paper."

The entire party decided to eat instead at a fine-dining restaurant in downtown Lansing.

Her advice to young cooks preparing their turkeys: "Dig, dig deep in there."

Colorfowl

One Thanksgiving, Donna Finch of Cedar checked on the turkey, which had been roasting for about two hours. To her shock, the bird was red. Finch remembered that months before she used the same roasting pan to dye something red. Apparently, washing the pan had not removed all of the dye.

When the turkey was fully cooked, Finch removed the skin and found the meat underneath was not colored. No one knew, and the turkey was still delicious, Finch reported.

If you can't stand the heat...

In the early 1970s, Ron McCreery of Traverse City worked at an upscale Illinois restaurant where he was charged with cooking five big turkeys for 200 Thanksgiving customers. The idea was to put each turkey in a large pizza oven about an hour apart so that the first bird was ready by the time the early diners showed up. McCreery started around 6 a.m. The temperature in the pizza oven was set to what he thought was a reasonable temperature, but the turkeys all came out extra crispy.

The restaurant owner found out about the problem about an hour before service started and ordered McCreery to remove by hand "any of the salvageable meat."

"I was paid to burn a hundred pounds of turkey," McCreery said.

He and management came to a "mutual understanding" that it would be his last day, but first he finished his shift, a "condemned man."

"I literally walked away in the rain, gathered up what I could in a backpack and started hitchhiking," McCreery said.

It was a meal he hasn't forgotten.

"I recovered and have been cooking Thanksgiving dinners ever since, but only for friends and family," he said. "Every Thanksgiving I think about it, and every Thanksgiving it is a little less painful because I've had so many good ones."

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