Though it seems to be getting better as more people experience better food and want to be more aware and able to do more at home, in my experience more people are poor cooks than good cooks. The annual chaos about how and when to cook a turkey, whose method to use, blah blah blah is a good demonstration of that.

In that spirit, I'm going to guess that the struggles of cooking a turkey, the all too frequent undercooked or overcooked experiences, is perhaps the most common Thanksgiving cooking goof. It's really a pretty easy thing to do with a small amount of cooking common sense, a timer and a instant read thermometer

Turkey is pretty easy to make. I think the hardest part for a lot of people is having everything ready to serve at the same time, especially when making a Thanksgiving type meal that has a lot of dishes served with it, rather than the one or two sides people make most of the time.

Scott. I thought the inside of the pumpkin the meat was used not the outside???

I think he meant that she used the strings and the seeds to make the pie.

Yes, she used the strings and the seeds, which I meant by innards. Ew!

I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at a relative's house one year and was disappointed when I walked in and didn't smell the turkey cooking. When I went in the kitchen she said it was cooling on the counter while she cooked the vegetables. She said she used a "new recipe" for making a 20 pound bird. 20 minutes at 450° . It was raw. I talked her into putting it back in the oven but she served it 30 minutes later. Cold and bloody. No-one ate any. Disaster. There wasn't even any conversation at the table as it was just too awkward.

My son said his now-former MIL never bought a fresh bird, and never properly thawed the frozen one. The turkey was still pretty raw most years and he was supposed to carve it. He learned to just do so, no one ate what was on their plate and that was this family's tradition. Weird... The woman never cooked. She was VERY wealthy. But no, she would NOT order the turkey already cooked yet bought all the sides that way. No figuring some people.

One year, with DD's in-laws as guests, I had made a lovely molded salad. I stood by the sink, ran water on the outside of the mold, then held it over the pretty plate on which it was to be served. Wellllllllllll, it slid past the plate, into dishwater in the sink. So much for that pretty presentation!

Blechhh^ I think my biggest Thanksgiving goof was the year that my DH was helping me with the last minute rush by mixing up the flour while I was making the gravy (and doing 3 other things at the same time, of course). Because it wasn't thickening at all, I kept asking him for more flour, as I'm whisking like a mad woman. Eventually one of us figured out that he was using confectioner's sugar. Sweetened gravy, anyone?

My brother made a pumpkin pie from scratch one year following the steps he remembered our mother doing when we were growing up. He scooped out the seeds, cut the flesh in large cubes, cut off the orange skin, and boiled the chunks until they were soft. He then mashed the pumpkin chunks, added eggs, condensed milk and spices, mixed and poured into the pie shell to bake. The part he didn't remember was where mom would use a vertical, conical food mill on the cooked pumpkin pieces to remove the long stringy fibers that run through the flesh of the pumpkin. The result tasted right, but it was very hard to cut with a fork and even harder to eat. I refer to it as fiberglass-reinforced pumpkin pie.

A few years ago I decided to surprise hubs with a lemon meringue pie, but he likes his with graham cracker crust. I had a few brown paper pouches of graham crumbs that I removed from the box and had in plastic tub..so I proceeded making the filling, got the graham crust in the pie pan, made the meringue topped the pie and popped it in the oven to golden the meringue...as I was taking it from the oven I thought it smelled strange...than it hit me. I ddidn't use graham crackers...I used two pouches of Shake N Bake.

LOL, mamapinky!

Not a Thanksgiving turkey, but the country hotel in Australia where I grew up had a roast turkey every Sunday for lunch. The first time it was my turn to cook the lunch (I think I was about 13), I thought you roasted the turkey one way up for half the coooking time, then turned it over to complete the roasting.

Well, by the time I got that huge bird turned over with the assistance of various meat forks, tongs and other implements of destruction, it looked like the victim of a particularly gruesome axe murder. And of course, the gravy woudn’t thicken, the beans wouldn’t cook, and so on. And _everyone_ ordered the turkey.

The next Sunday, my turkey looked like something out of a magazine. I think word must have gotten around town, though, because hardly anyone ordered turkey :-)

There's been so many Thanksgiving goofs, I almost can't list them. Fortunately none so extreme to have made anyone sick.

I think I'd been married all of about 5 minutes when my mother announced it was someone else's turn to start cooking the holiday dinners. She'd had enough. And really, she's never liked to cook or had enough interest to excel at it.

That first attempt I didn't own a roaster (bought one) and barely had enough dishes to set a large table. Greatly underestimated the time required to thaw a turkey and while I didn't forget the bag of giblets tucked into the cavity, I did pull it out with pliers, still frozen inside. That same dinner, I dropped the roaster taking it out of the oven using dish towels instead of pot holders. The turkey made a sliding dash towards the dining room on its own across the floor and I lost all my drippings for gravy. We ate the turkey.

Another dinner - I was hosting only my mother and sister. My BIL had been unwell, and his wife decided to travel to her mothers with the children and keep their holiday plans so as not to disappoint her mother. Turn of events, and DH got up in the middle of dinner and took his brother to the hospital where he was admitted for an emergency hemorrhoidectomy. We held dessert, he made it back home for that.

The first year my brothers wife had all of us for dinner, she didn't have an actual large roaster yet either and used one of the aluminum foil pans. It may even have been doubled. But she pulled the turkey out onto the open oven door to check the temperature for doneness and unknowingly pierced the disposable pan with the thermometer probe. All of the turkey pan juices ran into the oven door somehow, through the glass window seal - it was a large bird and there was a lot of liquid. Every time we opened or closed the oven the entire rest of the weekend, more turkey drippings ran out of the door bottom seal onto the floor. A quick Friday trip to Frederick and Nelson's to buy her a roaster took place.

My brother deep fried a turkey one Thanksgiving. He ordered the turkey, bought the fryer, made sure he had gas for the fryer and forgot oil. He hit every 7-11 within a 5 mile radius that morning buying every small bottle of oil on the shelves until he had enough to fill the fryer. Came in that afternoon saying 'the turkey is turning into a meteor, hurry up with the rest of the food so we can serve'. We hurried, tossing salads, mashing potatoes. It wasn't overcooked, it was not done clear through to the interior. Very pink thighs, he never deep fried another. Years later he cooked one in his Traeger grill and brought it in dusted with a fine powdery ash. And expected me to somehow do something magical with the drippings to make a delicious gravy from them. I used every spice I could think to try from their cupboards and could not cover the bitter taste of the pellet ashes, it was really awful gravy.

Collen, your method, as a 13 year old, of cooking a turkey is accepted practice today. Roasting it breast-side down so the juices run toward the breast and keeping the white meat moist and flipping to brown the skin toward the end of cooking is one of the many methods I've tried (along with brining, etc.) Of course, it's a lot easier to roast this way if it's a small turkey. I wouldn't want to try and flip a 22 lb. turkey! :-)))

Morz, I wish I’d been there to see the turkey sliding across the floor. I would have laughed my head off!

Your story reminds me of a story some well-known English caterer was telling o n the radio years ago, of how she was catering two different lunches for two groups on different floors of the same conference hotel. As she was carrying in a turkey for the first group, she tripped and the turkey shot off the platter and slid all the way under the table. She fished it out, put in on the platter and took it out, coming back with roast beef instead. With a bit of clean up, the turkey went to the other group :-).

I just remembered a work Christmas celebration we had at the boss’s home a few years ago. She had a big island in her kitchen right next to where the dining table was.

One of the children had dropped a glass and all the pieces were swept up into a dustpan, but because the kitchen where the bin was, was full of people frantically doing the last-minute dishing up, the full dustpan had to be placed on the floor, tucked up out of the way next to the island.

Now, the island was covered in food, including a huge cheesecake that had been made by one of the staff attending (we worked in a restaurant and she was the dessert cook). When dinner was over, and everyone as cleaning up, dishes were being stacked on the island. Someone pushed one to one side to make a space, and in the chain reaction we all watched in horror as the cheesecake was nudged clear off the island, flipped and landed face down on top of the broken glass in the dustpan. If it hadn’t been for the glass I’m sure we would have just scraped off the top and eaten it anyway, but it was not to be.

At least I had brought a huge tray of Christmas cookies.

My first turkey I cooked in a disposable foil pan. There was no problem getting it into the oven. However, once cooked... I realized I should've put a baking sheet under it. It was nearly impossible to lift the darn thing with all the liquid flowing about and the pan folding up around the bird as my husband and I tried to lift it out, resulting in quite an argument between us.

That Christmas my mom bought me a roaster that I've used ever since.

I pulled a good one, just this evening. I made pies--three pecan, two cherry, and two large pans of oatmeal apple-cranberry bars. I made two pecan pies the usual way, with whole pecans, but I always make my uncle a pie with ground pecans, because it's his all time favorite pie, and he doesn't like to wear his teeth (seriously). The egg base was in a bowl on the counter, pie shell in the freezer, waiting for the first two pies to come out of the oven. I don't fill the pie shells until just before they go into the oven, so they don't get soggy.

While I was waiting for the first two pies to bake, I decided to start the oatmeal bars. I use Pioneer Woman's oatmeal strawberry bar recipe, but use apple butter instead of strawberry preserves. The recipe calls for melted butter, so I put three sticks of butter in another mixing bowl, and melted it in the MW. I put the bowl with the melted butter on the counter to cool slightly while I gathered oats, flour, etc.

I added the oats and brown sugar to the melted butter, and started stirring with a whisk. It was much harder to stir than usual, and then it hit me--I'd added the ingredients for the oatmeal bars to my pecan pie egg base! Fortunately, I'd left out one cup of sugar (on purpose), so I added more oats and more flour, and cut it all in together. I'd already planned to add some chopped apples and sprinkle in a few dried cranberries, so I was hoping that the tartness of the apples and berries would off-set the corn syrup.

I mixed up another batch of egg base for Uncle's pecan pie, so all is well. :)

My lovely pies are cooling on the counter. I just tried an oatmeal bar, and it was good--a little thicker and more cake-y than usual, but not too sweet, and still yummy.

Nice save, Mama Goose. You were lucky. Or clever ;0)

I include a pecan pie with other family favorites for holiday dinners these last years for my nephew's wife. She asked one year if, like the others, she could request the pie that made a holiday feel like home to her. From Texas. she's a great young woman and we're lucky to have her, so of course I said yes. One holiday I had the shell chilled, filling mixed that I'd added chopped pecans to, had artfully arranged pecan halves on top of that - started to put it into the oven when I saw my bowl of melted butter still on the counter. I hadn't stirred it into the sugar, syrup and eggs.