OMG! You mean people still stop by here to check for new content?! OK then, I'll tell some stories

I have stories about turkeys and appliances. Where to begin?

I just now, not 10 minutes ago, broke our microwave oven. It's an old one, doesn't owe us a thing. The light burned out years ago; I haven't been able to see my food cook or watch Peeps joust.
(Damn, I've forgotten how to post video on here. Follow the link.) I was trying to melt chocolate chips in the microwave. It got hot at first, but with the chips partially melted, all of a sudden no progress. So I put the bowl on top of our fireplace stove insert and melted them old school. Score one for Fire.


The microwave is the third appliance that's gone bad in a month. Allow me to tell you about Thanksgiving. We were planning a simple affair already. Superman and I are living here alone now. (I know, right?! Sproing was the only one left, and he got put in jail, so it's just us now. We LOVE it! Long time coming, believe me.*) Twitch lives with roommates in an apartment a few miles away. Light is still in western Pennsylvania. Diva is in Greenville now, fifty-odd miles north, and we don't have much to do with each other. We invited Twitch, of course, to join us for Thanksgiving dinner, and encouraged him to bring along a few friends if any were hanging in the wind without plans. One of his coworkers came along, but that's all. So, four for dinner.

Superman did the turkey shopping. We had one already in the freezer; he got four more. At 59¢ per pound, yeah! We like turkey. He pulled out the biggest, a 16 pounder. It thawed in the refrigerator for a few days and was ready to roast by Thursday. In preparation I mixed up the sweet potato casserole the night before. It's good to do these things.** Thursday morning I baked the pumpkin pie in the bottom oven.

I love my range. Four burner flat top and double ovens. Bakes cookies in half the time. So for Thanksgiving, with only four for dinner, I decided that one pie would be enough. And it was. Superman fixed the dressing, which is really a modified bread pudding recipe I got from a Hobbit inspired cookbook. Lots of mushrooms and super tasty. But I digress. Planning to serve dinner around 6:00, we didn't need to start the turkey until mid afternoon. Late morning I had an influential nap attack and went to bed.

So about 3:00 Superman woke me up with a panicky tone to his voice. "I need some help with this turkey!" The recipe we use (Alton Brown's) calls for 30 minutes in a 450°F before reducing the heat for the rest of the roasting. Well, the bottom oven wouldn't get that hot. The display said 335° but I think it wasn't that hot. So we lowered the setting to 300°, if I recall. Superman had the turkey on the rack, in the roasting pan, stuffed with aromatics and greased up as if to swim the English Channel. (Not really. It was cooking oil, not whatever kind of fat they use for swimming of the Channel.) He put the pan in the oven, hoping for the best. Nope. This time the display showed something just above 200°F. So he took it out of the oven again, and didn't even need hot pads to hold the pan. What else to do but cover it and stick it back in the refrigerator.

What about a back up plan? you ask. Yes, I called Twitch to see if I could use their oven if it was available. It was available, in that no one was using it, but not available in that it's broken too. "Son, you live in an apartment complex with maintenance people for that kind of problem." Yeah, he'd called, the guy came and "fixed" it but didn't fix it. So no oven there. Most of my other friends, my real true friends, I met through this blog. They live all over the country and beyond, but not in Greenwood, SC.

Here's another spanner in the works, so to speak. First thing Friday morning we had to drive to the Chattanooga area to visit the in-laws for the weekend. Father-in-law's birthday is November 24th. His 86th, possibly his last.*** If we didn't cook the turkey on Thursday, it would go to waste. It wasn't going to survive three more days in the refrigerator, especially having been cleaned and prepped for cooking. Superman was in a tizzy. I was more or less amused, because Of Course. This is my life, or something like it.

We had the sweet potato and green bean casseroles ready to go into the big bottom oven, in dishes too high for the top oven. Superman transferred them into shallower pans, of course messing up the neat toppings, though he tried to keep the tops on top. Twitch and Friend showed up about then. Friend was super cool with whatever, and I don't think Twitch cared that much, either. By this time I could definitely see the humor in the situation. Poor Superman, though, was still hung up on the original Beautiful Thanksgiving Dinner. He was stressed.

So we had a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner. The casseroles were hot, though the dressing had cooled down too much. Superman put it in the small oven to reheat, but didn't leave it long enough. Tepid dressing/bread pudding is ... not that good.

I had planned to use the fancy china I got from my Mama this summer when I helped her move out of her condo and into a retirement community apartment. That's another good story perhaps I'll relate soon. (Don't hold your breath. I tend to forget to do stuff like that.) But if the oven couldn't be arsed to cook the turkey, I wasn't going to use the fine china.

Dinner over, company gone, it was time to address the raw turkey situation. I had a trick up my sleeve, a bit of knowledge Superman didn't have. There are such things as counter top electric roasters.

And because Christmas is too commercialized and corporations are greedy and some people are suckers for a deal, the stores were open the evening of Thanksgiving Day. Which I think generally is a travesty, but am nonetheless thankful for in this instance. I informed Superman of the electric turkey roaster's existence. I checked the interwebz for their availability at Walmart. Ta-da! Being the super man that he is, Superman braved the crazed hordes of shoppers to procure said turkey roaster, first at the closer Walmart, but coming up empty there, at the Walmart across town. Good thing we live in a small town. He was gone a long time. He claims there were 13 million people at the other Walmart. One of the few Walmart Associates™ on the floor helped him find the one single turkey roaster in the store, bless her heart (and I mean that in the nicest way). He stood in line for 75 minutes to check out. He timed it. He'll tell you about it if you ask.

By the time he got home it was nearly 9:00 p.m. Checked the operating instructions - gotta preheat the thing for 20 minutes. He plugged it into the extension cord that reaches to the far counter because our kitchen is an old piece of shite with insufficient electric outlets. Twenty minutes later the thing is still cold. Oops. I forgot to plug the extension cord back in when I used the hand mixer to prepare the sweet potatoes. Yeah, I felt really bad for that. So, plug in the extension cord, preheat the roaster for real this time, and FINALLY cook the damned turkey.

Turns out that the electric roaster cooks a turkey faster than the oven will. That's cool. It was midnight when Superman finally got to bed. I'd been asleep for almost two hours by then. He put the turkey back in the original roasting pan, now clean of course, covered it with foil and stuck it in the refrigerator. We got up at 6:00 a.m. and drove five hours to northwest Georgia (avoiding the interstate highways, because Holiday Traffic). Nope, no turkey for breakfast. Ain't nobody got time for that. We got home after dark Sunday night, too tired and wired from the in-law visit (another frustrating experience) and the long drive home, to bother with heating up the dinner. Monday night, though, we reheated everything and finally had our Thanksgiving Turkey dinner.

Man, I'm exhausted from telling that tale.

There are a couple more failed appliances to tell you about, but dinner's ready now and this post is long. I'll put this one up and finish the story in the next post.

*Long time coming for us to have the house to ourselves. Not (necessarily) a long time coming for Sproing to be in prison, and yes he's in real prison now. Although considering his history, perhaps being incarcerated follows logically.

**If you're interested, I have a really good sweet potato casserole recipe that's low in fat and sugar and tastes really good.

***Last year his 85th birthday fell on Thanksgiving Day. We were there. Sis-in-law hosted the big family dinner that was a surprise party for Dad that looked suspiciously like a Thanksgiving dinner, but wasn't. It was a birthday party. He said that was probably his last birthday. Actually, I believe he's been predicting his imminent death for close to a decade.