What was your biggest Thanksgiving disaster - and how could you have prevented it?

My first Thanksgiving as a new wife, I was excited to have both sides of our new family to dinner in our home. I woke up on Thanksgiving morning and took the turkey out of the fridge, only to learn that it was still frozen. I was panicked! I decided the best way to thaw it would be to run it under water, but it was a huge bird. Water from the sink was splashing all over the kitchen and the stream from the faucet was only reaching one small section of the turkey at a time. I needed a better plan....then I remembered the Jacuzzi tub. I filled the tub in our master bathroom with cold water and turned on the jets. I placed the turkey in the tub and watched as it bobbed up and down and floated around the tub. An hour later, my turkey was thawed and ready to roast. I guess the massage was much needed; it was the most tender turkey I have ever tasted! I suppose I could have thawed it earlier, but then I would not have this hilarious story to tell!

In the '60's, I was a US Government civilian employee working in Vietnam. By filling out a form with 13 copies, I was able to get a frozen turkey flown to me from the PX. This was my first try at cooking a turkey. I had no instructions. A group of friends were to gather for a sail & fishing in the South China Sea. The plan was to have lots of food in a cooler to make sandwiches. BTW, the best French bread was then and is still now is found in Vietnam. I shoved the frozen bird into the gas stove oven maybe 4 or 5 PM, expecting to pull it out, fully cooked, in 3 hours or so. The bird cooked, but much slower than I expected. I kept checking on it though the night, & found it fully cooked about 2 AM. In the morning, I bought bread, carved the bird, packed it into a cooler and we set out to sea in a rented piloted sampan. The wind was against us, so we never got out of the harbor, much less down the coast. We laid in the lee of a small island. I remember the sand beach at the base of the island rocks were covered with hundreds of hermit crabs. When we heard machinegun fire from shore, we gave up and headed home. Nobody complained about the turkey. There were no leftovers.

One year my mom and I attempted to carve the turkey, with each of us cutting away at a side of the bird. We had gotten off most of the breast meat and where working on the darker thigh area when my mom's knife slipped and went straight through the cavity of the bird and into my hand. Thankfully a trip to the emergency room wasn't needed. We now have a rule that only one person is allowed to touch the turkey at at time.

My worst Thanksgiving disaster just came last year at my daughters. I was taking the turkey out of the oven when unbeknown to me some grease had fallen on the floor of the oven. This caused a ball of flames to shoot out and caught my hair on fire. Everyone came running into the kitchen and my son in law, who was standing next to me at the time, starts hitting my head to put the flames out. Well my dear husband decides that a bowl of water would do the trick and proceeds to pour it all over me. I ran upstairs in tears and with the help of my daughters was reassured it would be okay. After 40 Min's. later, Thanksgiving dinner was served and all had a great time. Even me with my cinched hair smelling horrible. This could have all been prevented if my daughter had used a roasting pan instead of these tin things that you throw away after using. These can be very dangerous when there's as much grease that a turkey has. So need I said that after that incident last year, this year I'm ready to let the turkey live and bring on the ham....

I cook my turkey slowly overnight. Onr morning the alarm went off telling me to turn off the oven - the turkey was finished. My husband offered to turn the oven off for me. About one hour later I smelled something burning. I got up and looked in the oven to see a shriveled up burnt turkey. My husband had turned the dial the wrong way and had it on broil or the highest thinking he was turning it off. I panicked! I cried! We were having my family over for Thanksgiving dinner at 1:00 PM and I didnt have a turkey! My husband got out at about 7:30 and started looking for a store that was open wo he could get a turkey. He saw people in one store that did not open until 8:00 and he beat on the door til someone came to see what his problem was. He told them and they were nice enough to let him in and buy a turkey. He came home with a 20 lb. FROZEN turkey! We started running water over it and it was not doing any good - I couldnt even get the giblets out. This was before many people, including us, did not have microwaves. We were in trouble. My husband went outside for something (probably to get away from me crying and and yelling not so very nice words ) Our next door neighbor spoke to me hisband, told him Happy Thanksgiving, Roy told him what had happemed and the neighbor told him they had just bought a microwave and maybe they could thaw it for us! We were so happy! We were then able to cook the turkey in a brown and bake bag and it was ready only a little later than we had originally planned to eat. Everything was ok. Needless to say, from then on I got up and tended to the turkey!.

Had a dog get up onto the counter while we were all stepped outside for a cigarette. She left the sweet stuff and the veggies alone but the meats and stuffing and gravy and dinner rolls were all destroyed. The lesson: Don't leave animals and food unattended.

I accidentally poked a hole in my aluminum roasting pan which caused the drippings from the turkey to fall on the open flame of my gas stove. Yes, there was a fire. I shut off the gas and was planning on trying to save the turkey by dousing it with flour, but my husband had already taken the fire extinguisher to it. I suppose it was the right thing to do, but we had no turkey of our own that year. A simple oven liner would have prevented this mishap. I learned my lesson!

Thanksgiving dinner is always held at my sister's house. She has a dear friend who is from Germany and was excited to participate in this All American event. As we are from New England our boys all played football on Thanksgiving and everyone returns home to the feast. When we returned home, with very hungry football players in tow, to check the turkey and begin final preparations for dinner we discover that our German friend had flipped the lever on the front of the oven to "self-clean" and our turkey was stuck inside madly cooking away. Four hours later, after we ate all of the vegetables and desserts the oven had cooled down enough for us to enjoy turkey and stuffing sandwiches for a late night snack.

Someone came in the kids' bedroom window in the night and stole our turkey out of the freezer! My daughter came into our bedroom and said that someone had come into her room through the window. I thought she was having a nightmare and put her back to bed. The next day I got some ice cream out of the freezer and was eating it, when all of a sudden it dawned on me that 'something was missing'. LOL. I went back to the freezer and sure enough, the bird was gone !! The only thing I can think of was that the thief may have been a neighborhood girl with a tough reputation. She was at the foot of our driveway the day we brought the turkey home from the store, and must have seen us getting it out of the car.