I remembered another FAIL. This one was a classic. You know the trope about bad thanksgiving turkey, where folks mess that up in a variety of ways because they're not used to cooking turkey? I had never known anyone that actually happened to, and then it happened to me.
Let me preface by saying my mother was generally an excellent cook. She made her living cooking any number of awesome and delicious things, so for this to go so badly was unexpected. And yet, in hindsight, I was not surprised at all - my parents are very much the make it work type, but IMO some things you just need to bite the bullet and fix them.
We entered the house and there was this wet burnt meat stench that just permeated everything.
Me: "Mom, what did you burn?"
Mom: "Oh, everything's fine, I'm just cooking the turkey".
Me: "What happened? Why does is smell like something has burned in here?"
Mom: "Oh, the oven got a little hot. The thermostat broke, but the oven still works. I've been turning it off and on to cook the turkey. I think part of it might have gotten burned, but we'll just cut that part off."
Me: "When did the oven break?"
Mom: "Oh I don't know, maybe a month or so ago. It really wasn't an issue, we just turn the oven on and off when we want to use it"
Me: "Why didn't you tell us? One of us kids could have helped you fix it."
Mom: "It didn't seem like much of an issue. I think we'd have to replace the entire oven to fix the thermostat, and we didn't want to do that. It seemed like it would be a lot of trouble."
Me: "Why didn't you call me? I could've cooked the turkey in my oven."
Mom: "Oh, I know how busy you are. You said you didn't want to cook the turkey."
Me: "Well, yeah, but that was when I thought you had a working oven (!!!)"
Now, it's a basic builder's model electric oven from the early 90s, so it didn't hold or distribute heat well, it relied on the heating unit thermostat to keep things even. By the time we came over, about half an hour or an hour before we were supposed to eat, things were long past fixing. She'd been turning the oven on and off all day. Whenever the oven was on, it was going full bore, with no moderation, and the only way to stop it from heating was to turn the oven off. So when it was on, it was like at 550F or hotter and the turkey was on a rack maybe 4" away from the element. It was obviously a setup for disaster, but my parents were oblivious!
Finally the turkey was taken out of the oven. Mom cut off the blackened charred bits, sliced the rest of it up, and fully expected us to eat it. The burned stench of burnt oven had permeated the entire bird to the point where it was totally unpalatable. I tried a small piece, and sure enough, it was inedible. I just couldn't do it. I don't even want to think of what outgassed chemicals from the charred oven coating were in there. In no way did it even taste like turkey. And you couldn't tell my mother that because it would hurt her feelings, and there was nothing to be done about it anyway.
So I put as small an amount of turkey as possible on my plate, pushed it around throughout the meal, ate the sides (which had been prepared in everyone else's ovens) and tossed it in the trash when the meal was over.
Yes, Mom, everything was fine. Thank you for hosting us, and for the pleasant meal. So nice to see everyone.
Mom encouraged each of us to take a large portion of the turkey home "so it wouldn't go to waste". I accepted.
It went to my house and then directly into the trash. I have an absolute aversion to wasting food, but that was no longer food. It wasn't even worthy of the compost heap.
My sister was much more involved in my mom's Thanksgiving preparations after that. The entire stove was replaced within the month. And we never had burnt turkey again.
