"There were broken teeth trying to eat [the stuffing]."
Thanksgiving is coming up, and with it... a lot of nostalgic fun! And, let's be real, a lot of stress. Whose house are we going to?! Will Uncle Jim be there? And most importantly, who's cooking what?
I swear, every family has a legendary tale of some horrible Thanksgiving cooking mishap, and in retrospect, they are almost always hilarious. So, I decided to ask members of our BuzzFeed Community to dish (haha, get it? Dish?) their family's most infamous Thanksgiving cooking fails. Here are some of their best responses:
1. "My grandmother and my aunt lived in the same apartment building and they decided to host Thanksgiving at their place for my entire (quite large) family. My aunt was cooking the turkey in her oven and my grandmother was to cook the sides at her place."
"Fast forward five hours, and everyone was looking for the turkey only to find my aunt had gone out for a smoke, and although she did manage to get the turkey in the oven, she forgot to turn the oven on."
2. "Not a catastrophe, per se, but one year we sat down to dinner and realized my mom forget the stuffing. THE STUFFING. I haven’t let her live it down."
3. "It was probably about 2005; my mother-in-law was frantically trying to get everything finished so that things were ready at about the same time. She had put the candied yams into the oven to crisp up the marshmallows with the broiler... then COMPLETELY forgot about them—until the smoke started coming out of the oven."
"We pulled the pan out, got the fire put out, and scrapped off the black marshmallow remains. We put the new marshmallows on top, and back under the broiler they went. A few minutes later, once again, smoke came pouring out of the oven again... Somehow, we all missed it again.
That year we had yams with no marshmallows and a little charcoal on top."
4. "One year we had potatoes for dinner—only potatoes—and it was my fault entirely."
"I...
1. Got very drunk before starting to cook.
2. Forgot to cook any vegetables.
3. Named the birds and then cried at the idea of putting them in the oven.
4. Cut my hand peeling the potatoes and got blood everywhere.
5. Fell asleep and woke up to charcoal.
Voila, enjoy your potato dinner."
5. "I was in charge of turkey one year. I did everything right: I seasoned it and I looked it to perfection, but something was missing. I thought it would be a cute idea to decorate the turkey as a cute dog since I love my own doggo so much. I decorated it and was pretty happy with it. Later that day, to my horror, I saw my dog by the turkey, doing unimaginable things to it. It wasn't eaten."
6. "One year my grandma was carving the turkey ceremoniously and as she was leaning over the bird, her sleeve caught on fire. She didn't notice for a while and my uncle was just yelling, '[Grandma,] you're on FIRE! On FIRE!!!'"
"When she finally noticed, she ripped her shirt off and jumped up and down on it for an eternity. The image of my topless grandmother stomping on her flaming Anne Klein blouse has haunted me. I see it in slow motion every year when I watch somebody cut into the turkey. Rest in peace Grandma, that was lowkey hilarious, sorry about your shirt."
7. "One year we were all sitting around inside while my dad cooked a turkey in a fryer outside. In the middle of watching Thanksgiving football, we started seeing people go past the windows into the back yard. Upon closer inspection, these people were firefighters."
"Not only did my dad catch the yard on fire, he called 911 and didn’t tell anyone in the house that the back yard was actively burning! He’s had a lot of cooking mishaps that involved the emergency room; thankfully this was not included."
8. "I was in charge of doing some of the vegetables (roast red potatoes, butternut squash, onions, and parsnips), and was going to have to leave the house extremely early to get to where we were having Thanksgiving that year"
"I came up with the brilliant plan of cooking everything that night when I got home from a friend's birthday party so that it could all just be heated up when I got to my destination on Thursday. Well, my dumb ass greatly overestimated my stamina.
The veggies went into the oven at around midnight, and I promptly fell fast asleep on the couch and never thought to set an alarm in case I fell asleep while everything was cooking.
Woke up at around 6 a.m. The vegetables in the oven were an unholy blackened mess. I told my family one of the cats had knocked everything on the floor."
9. "Mine is not crazy, just funny. I only have three people in my immediate family so we will just do a turkey breast for the main course... not the full thing. Well, my sweet mother did not realize that the breast also takes hours to thaw, so we had no main course... Luckily her dogs are very spoiled and always get turkey sandwich meat on top of their dog food.. so we had that instead. The were still the best part. ;)"
10. "My family is NOT great at cooking. This was Thanksgiving 2020 and Grandma stayed at her own house. My mom said she'd taken a plate to my grandma. I thought it was odd since Mom was literally still cooking; the turkey was in the oven, and sides were still in progress."
"I asked Mom what she'd taken to Grandma.
'I got her a turkey Hungry Man meal.' She GAVE HER MOM A HEATED-UP HUNGRY MAN MEAL!
I was like, 'Seriously Mom? Grandma's really old. That might be her last Thanksgiving meal and you gave her a frozen dinner?' During our meal we kept tossing out ideas of other things Mom could have done, like getting a few slices of thick-cut turkey from the deli counter, etc.
Turns out, it WAS Grandma's last Thanksgiving. The running joke now is that we'll give Mom a Hungry Man when we think it's her time."
11. "Not so much a cooking disaster, but when my mom was first living in LA, her parents decided to visit her for Thanksgiving. My mom decided to take them out for Thanksgiving dinner and made reservations at what looked like a nice restaurant."
"On Thanksgiving Day they sat down to eat only to realize the restaurant was VEGAN. My grandfather was NOT happy about not getting turkey. He never let my mom forget it."
12. "My grandma put the turkey in the oven WITH THE PLASTIC STILL ON IT. That set off the smoke alarms, but we got those to stop. She [then] tried to SERVE the plastic melted into the turkey. My mom shut that down real quick, and we ended up just ordering out Chinese food."
13. "The first year I hosted Thanksgiving I could not find anything that would fit the turkey to brine it in that would also fit in the fridge overnight. My sister came up from the basement with a big plastic cat litter bin (not the litter box, the bin that unused cat litter comes in), and that fit the turkey with brine and the fridge."
"So we washed it out with a bleach solution, soap, and water, and rinsed it outside with the hose until it was sparkling clean.
My mom came over just as we were about to put the turkey in the oven, and the look on her face as we took the turkey out of the cat litter brine bin was absolutely amazing."
14. "My mom was always looking for time-saving cooking hacks for Thanksgiving. One year she tried cooking mashed potatoes in the crockpot without testing the recipe. There was too much potato in it for her crockpot. We ended up with a mashed potato volcano."
"Then when dessert was served, we quickly found out that she forgot to add sugar to the pumpkin pie. Mom was so embarrassed that year."
—Anonymous
15. "My Mom worked all day on two 20+ pound turkeys for the close to 30 people we had coming for dinner. The turkey was pulled out and left in the kitchen when we were taking family photos outside."
"When we came back in about 30 minutes later, we discovered that my cousin's black lab had broken out of his crate, pulled both turkeys off the counter, and was eating one. Our dog, who was too small to reach the counter herself, was eating the other.
I have never seen my mom so heartbroken and furious at the same time. A few of us ran to any grocery store we could find open to buy any premade turkey we could find.
We ended up with about half of what we would have had. That happened over 20 years ago and the story still gets told every year at the Thanksgiving dinner table."
16. "The Curse of the Green Bean Casserole. My family will never cook it again."
"The first year my parents made it, they completely forgot that it existed and left it in the warming drawer for three days.
The second year, it was burnt to a crisp.
The third year, I decided to take a stab at it. Prepped the casserole the night before and popped it in the fridge. Moved it directly from the fridge to the 400-degree oven. The glass dish cracked right down the middle. Green beans and mushroom soup EVERYWHERE. Never again. Never. Again."
—Anonymous
17. "The first year my mom hosted, she over-brined the turkey to the point that it was inedible. The table started getting unnaturally quiet as our tastebuds were inundated with saltiness; then my grandfather asked, 'Can somebody pass me the salt?' and everyone (my mom included) burst into laughter."
"No one took more than one bite of turkey, but the entire meal ended up tasting like eating straight salt. We still refer to it as ‘the year of the brine’ 15 years later."
—Anonymous
18. "We showed up at my wife’s grandparents house and nothing was prepared. Grandma had gotten mad at Grandpa, had a few drinks, and fell asleep while Grandpa slept in front of the TV. So we all arrived to find a raw turkey and sides that hadn’t been started."
"Everyone pitched in and finished the food and we had a late dinner. I’m not sure Grandma and Grandpa ever realized what had happened. My wife and her parents decided we’d take a cruise for Thanksgiving the next year and after that we all just brought the food to grandma’s house."
—Anonymous
19. "At the in-laws for Thanksgiving. My sister-in-law was making macaroni and cheese and she used the cheap flimsy aluminum pan to bake it in. She took out the pan to stir it and of course, the pan ended up collapsing and hot mac and cheese went everywhere."
"It spilled into the hot oven, onto the floor, into the drawer below the oven—it was a mess. She was also cussing while all this was happening. It took forever to clean up. Now I always ask her if she's going to make her famous @$*!$# mac n cheese for the family gatherings."
—Anonymous
20. "One year we decided to have Thanksgiving at my Grandma's vacation house about two hours away instead of just having it at her house. She drove part of the way down and realized she'd left the pumpkin pie at home. At home in the oven. The oven that was still on."
"For reasons I do not know, she still brought the very burnt pie, which just looked like burnt coals. But luckily there were no fires and no one was hurt, not even when my uncle brought out fireworks at the end of the night."
—Anonymous
21. "I forgot to put the sugar in the pumpkin pies. Barf."
—Anonymous
22. And finally: "My ex's Mom made stuffing for the turkey with matzoh. Baked, non-leavened bread, with water added to it and then baked. There were broken teeth trying to eat it."
—Anonymous
Let me know your thoughts on these Thanksgiving fails down in the comments below! And if you have any cooking fails of your own to share, I definitely want to hear them.
Or, if you want to write in but prefer to stay anonymous, you can check out this anonymous Google form. Who knows — your answer may end up in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!