On Thursday, our family will gather for grub, card games and football, and we will re-tell favorite Thanksgiving stories.
My house is probably a lot like yours.
Everyone will have a good chuckle about the year I cooked the bird with the breast side down. When I went to slice it, I panicked when I thought I bought one with no white meat. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
Last week, I visited the East County Senior Center in Monroe and asked the luncheon crowd to tell me their favorite Thanksgiving disaster stories.
Pat Wright, 75, who lives in Monroe, said years ago, she put a turkey in the oven and set the timer so it would be done when her family got home from bowling. That was new to me, Thanksgiving bowling, but they left the bird in the oven and set the timer so the heat would turn on.
"The timer didn’t work," Wright said. "There was a raw turkey when we got home."
The resourceful group sliced the bird and put it in a pan on the stove.
"Fried turkey is very good," she said. "That was the last time I trusted the timer."
Several folks had stories from a stormy year, probably 1983 or 1991, when the power went out all around the Puget Sound area. Marylyn Eastman, 68, said her family was lucky because they had a travel trailer in the yard.
"We went to our trailer and cooked Thanksgiving dinner," Eastman said. "We had like 12 guests. Thank goodness the turkey had been started in the oven. It was interesting. I didn’t think it was fun."
When her power went out one Thanksgiving, Vi VanZile, 74, who lives in Snohomish, cranked up a generator that produced enough power to run the stove. Her niece came over and brought her turkey to cook with the generator power. The day was saved and they all shared a good meal.
The executive director at the center, Krista Gibson, hasn’t had luck cooking turkeys.
"There was the time I had friends over, put a turkey in the oven but (the heat) was too low," Gibson said. "We were supposed to eat at two and we ate at 6. Another time, I tried to cook a turkey in a convection oven, but it took a long time, too."
This year, Gibson’s brother is smoking a turkey outside.
Though Christine Forbes, 83, couldn’t remember any disasters at Thanksgiving, she did have to step lightly. She has eight children who all live in Washington, and several want their mother at their homes on Thursday.
"I go to the first one who asks me," Forbes said. "You don’t play favorites with family." This year, she will go to her son’s home in Sultan.
Christmas is easy because everyone gathers at Forbes’ home in Monroe.
To please her family, Barb Leatherbury, 44, program director at the center, was cooking one of her first holiday meals. She thought it would be a good idea to cook her mother’s green beans in a pressure cooker.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t used to using a pressure cooker and she wasn’t used to cooking with gas.
Green beans exploded all over the kitchen.
And the turkey wasn’t done.
"It was a bloody mess," Leatherbury said. "We had toasted cheese sandwiches, yams and salad."
Nothing could top another Leatherbury Thanksgiving.
When she was a little girl, the family went to her aunt’s house. They were going to eat home-canned green beans. Her aunt had put up too many jars. So she tossed extra beans that were to be for the Thanksgiving meal into the backyard.
The beans must have had botulism, because 100 chickens and two dogs that ate the beans keeled over while the turkey was in the oven, she said.
Though her aunt was a wonderful cook, Leatherbury said, no one wanted to eat that year.
Another group didn’t eat on the holiday. Evelyn Johnson, 70, who lives in Monroe, got to gabbing one year with her sister in Marysville. They had breakfast and fussed around, then noticed it was too late to cook a turkey.
"We spent the night," Johnson said. "We cooked the turkey the next day and had Thanksgiving dinner on Friday."
And one more group didn’t eat turkey. Pat Bell, 80, who lives in Lake Stevens, was at her daughter’s house for the feast. Her daughter kept saying the turkey wasn’t ready, the turkey wasn’t done, then her daughter got fed up with the oven.
"She got so mad at the not-done bird, she threw it in the backyard," Bell said. "The neighbor dogs were happy."
The Bell family enjoyed canned ham that year.
Though many of us have funny stories to share Thursday, Barbara Corvey, who was working in the East County Senior Center thrift shop, said there are no things that go wrong on a holiday.
"You just make it into something else," Corvey, 57, said. "So that didn’t work, well, figure out something else."
That’s a good point to remember Thursday in the kitchen.
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com
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