Not all turkeys are on a platter

Appeared Nov. 27, 2006

I have a fancy Jenn-Air cooktop in my new kitchen.
I think it can do anything but send a man to the moon.
It has a grill that becomes a griddle and there is a whole cupboard full of gadgets and gizmos for the thing that I haven’t even explored yet.
The pictures in the instruction booklet show amazing feats of cooking being performed by a beautifully coiffed woman in a dress and high heels.
She is the picture of cool, calm and collected as she watches her chicken cook on its rotisserie (another amazing presto-chango of the grill-griddle).
Well, at 7 a.m. Thanksgiving morning, I was standing at my Jenn-Air cooktop, but that is where any resemblance to the June Cleaver woman ended.
It wasn’t a lovely sight.
I was wearing cutoff sweatpants and a T-shirt with my hair pulled up and no makeup on trying to figure out how I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner for 30 people on a stove with one burner - one ELECTRIC burner.
I really did not go walking up and down the street inviting every stranger I saw to Thanksgiving dinner. No, 30 is the number of people in my immediate family. But that’s OK. The way I look at it is if you have to cook for more than two, you might as well cook for 30.
And, sadly, it wasn’t 31. This was the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother. Even though she had some problems the last couple years - like serving utensils would pile up on her plate because she would forget to pass them with the platters - at least she was with us.
But we were able to bring my mother-in-law home from the nursing home for dinner so that gave us something to be thankful for.
Anyway, I knew there was a problem with the stove two weeks ago so I called a repairman.
He was there bright and early the next morning. He was this old guy with gray hair who said he was helping out his son who owned the repair business. That was nice, I thought. He must have retired and was looking for something to occupy his time.
We chatted - me, the youthful Jenn-Air owner and him, the old repairman - while he yanked and tapped on the cooktop, stopping occasionally to mop his brow.
The conversation came around to the question all conversations with repairmen seem to come around to: Where did you go to high school?
Come to find out, we went to the same high school.
And graduated the same year.
Good thing the stove wasn’t working, I would have choked on whatever I had cooked on it. But I don’t think I gasped and I recovered quickly, storing that little piece of information wherever middle-aged people store things that freak them out.
Anyway, he said it was just a loose wire, and he fixed it.
I repressed the overwhelming urge to tell him I didn’t believe it was that simple - a move I lived to regret when, on Thanksgiving morning with only six hours until dozens of hungry family members would descend upon me, I only had one working burner.
Well, there was some judicious potato-cooking and I baked and nuked everything I could and, of course, everything came out fine.
Preparing the meal was more difficult this year - burner problems aside.
I attributed it to being in a new house and not being able to find some rather important Thanksgiving things - such as tablecloths and the good china - but maybe there’s another reason I had a harder time preparing Thanksgiving dinner this year.
Wait, let me get a towel to mop my brow while I think about what it could be.