Too funny!  I’ve cooked a bird with the bag inside of it, too.  I even stuck my hand in there (yuck) & somehow missed it, so I went along with my prep.  My husband found it when he went to carve the bird.

My biggest disaster was buying a too-big turkey for an oven I’d just “moved to” and the thing didn’t get done until, like, 3 hours after I wanted to serve dinner! To make matters worse, my mother-in-law was visiting and I think she was about ready to gnaw on the table cloth before we got any dinner!

For the record, my aunt did the same thing and then her husband proceeded to cut pieces of white meat as thick as steaks.  She also broke a cardinal thanksgiving rule - she put out too many dips and appetizers, so none of the kids were hungry.

Our family put together a little cookbook years later, and in it is “Sharon’s recipe for turkey” which includes instructions on how to cook the turkey with innards and plastic bag included.  Two years ago the poor thing extremely over salted the mashed potatoes and incited mass anger.  It’s just not her holiday.

Based on all you guys, they need to put a black box warning on the outside of the turkey about the plastic bag inside. LOL!

Years ago, my mom roasted her turkeys in a brown paper bag. Don’t know where she got the idea, but they were always moist and delicious.  One Thanksgiving, she invited my dad’s new boss and his family for dinner.  She used her brown bag trick, but didn’t realize she had chosen a double layer bag.  When she pulled the turkey out of the oven, it was practically raw!  We didn’t have a microwave at the time, so she ended up racing across town to a friend’s with a half cooked bird so she could microwave Thanksgiving dinner for the boss and his family!  (They ended up becoming dear family friends, and never missed an opportunity to harass my mom about her special cooking techniques.)

For our first Thanksgiving 25 years ago I wanted to make a pumpkin pie from scratch for my husband (no canned pumpkin for me).  My mom was a wonderful baker and I wanted to be just as good (ok, better) than she was.  I bought a pumpkin at the grocery store and didn’t realize at the time that smaller “pie” pumpkins even existed. Once home, I cut up the pumpkin into 1 inch pieces and tried to weigh it on the bathroom scale (big mistake) because the recipe called for 2 pounds of pumpkin per pie and I didn’t own a kitchen scale.  With my only cookbook (the orange Betty Crocker Cookbook, now faded and worn) in hand, I started cooking the pumpkin.  I ended up with so much pumpkin pie filling that I had to send my husband out for additional ingredients.  Several hours and a huge mess in the kitchen later, I had 8 pumpkin pies!  Needless to say, I ended up delivering pies to family, friends and even our apartment manager.  I haven’t made a “homemade” pumpkin pie since!

I can’t seem to get that image of you weighing the pumpkin on the bathroom scale out of my mind! Too funny! Thanks for sharing. I was beginning to think it was only turkey disasters!

If we expanded it beyond T-Day to ALL cooking disasters I wonder what we’d have? LOL!

From Betsy, via Facebook:

Last year some college students (nieces/friends/son) arrived the night before thanksgiving. I made a broccoli casserole that happened to come out of the oven while they were here. It never made it past midnight ... much less turkey day.

From Jan, via Facebook:

Since we’re confessin’ - I screwed up the pumpkin pies. Put two cans in for two pies, but only enough additives for one. Discovered after putting it in the first shell; had to empty it out of soggy crust and back into the bowl; then forgot sugar! But the pecan pie was great.