Saving Thanksgiving

Some of you have heard me whining about our broken oven this week. On Sunday night, several hours after buying our turkey and a week's worth of meals that all required baking, the oven blew up. There was a bright flash, and loud POP, and the entire electric range shut down. Luckily after resetting the switches in the fuse box, we discovered that the burners still work. But the oven is dead, as is the digital component that shows the timer, clock, etc.

Although we rent our condo, we do not rent from a company leasing office that might have replaced our oven within a day. Instead, we rent from the woman who still owns the condo, and to her credit she told us if we got a couple of estimates that seemed reasonable to go ahead and get it taken care of. But the two estimates we received ranged from $425 - $465, and neither company could get the parts they needed in time to fix the oven before Thanksgiving. And considering she could probably buy a brand new oven for that price, we decided to hold off on making any decision.

In the meantime, my parents (who were visiting this past week) got creative with the meals we'd planned to make - one night they used the crock pot instead of the oven, and the next night they made soup using all the ingredients that were supposed to be used for making pasties (Jason is still sad).

As for Thanksgiving day, we saved the day by purchasing this 18-quart electric roaster, which was on sale for $39.99 at Macys.

I've never used one of these before (and technically still haven't, since my parents did all the cooking). But I was impressed, because not only did we cook a turkey with stuffing in less than 5 hours, but we used the roaster to bake acorn squash and homemade rolls. We still had the use of our burners to make mashed potatoes, baked beans, and gravy, and with a store-bought pumpkin pie for dessert we had a complete Thanksgiving dinner!