Thanksgiving gone wrong?- By Jennifer

Let me predicate this post by saying that I am grateful, but I have been pretty jaded as of late with ungrateful people and just could not bring myself to cook Thanksgiving, house an additional 5 people. Two years ago, I lost feeling in my right arm for two weeks after cooking for Thanksgiving. This was an auto-immune response from the stress from cooking and prepping the house for 11 people to eat dinner. There is a lot of running around to make sure you have the correct food, clean sheets, inflatable beds, etc for guests. Then there is all of the post wrath including the tons of laundry and dishes, not to mention all of the expense and lifting involved. That cost me at least $5,000 with the CT scans, MRIs, and various amounts of tests I had run to decide what was wrong with my arm. Did I mention this went undiagnosed at the time and was later diagnosed as Thoracid Outlet which is your first rib putting pressure on your artery. Picture putting a rubber band around your finger, you no longer feel it, but when you take it off, it hurts like the dickens. Thanks to Doctor King at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. 

Anyway, this year, I cancelled Thanksgiving, I don’t feel well and my health is failing so I cannot carry a turkey, cannot fish it out of the freezers and place into my cart and then into my freezer, etc. I was going to go cook for the Ronald McDonald house or do something altruistic, but I have been so busy with collecting Socks of Love for the homeless, and baking pies for the unfortunate with the Girl Scouts that I haven’t even had the time to plan something. My husband decided that we already had some sort of meat in the house and making a pot roast in the crockpot would be easy enough, his dad could come up and it would be a non-issue, easy peasey. OK, no problem. I decided that we would have potatoes and carrots in the crockpot, but then I decide that we needed the green bean casserole to go with it. I got up early, we live super close to the train station and it honks super load as it goes through. Normally, I would be mad, but thanks to the train, I was able to score some early Black Friday deals that I probably would have missed out, had I not been up at that hour. I started the “pot roast” about 6am after I made chex mix in the oven and cut up the potatoes and carrots. I cut the roast in half so there would be room in the pot for the carrots and potatoes and put half in the instant pot on slow cook. Around noon, the instant pot was fully de-pressurized and opened it up and checked on it. Hmmm…that is awfully red. My father in law likes his meat like shoe leather, so that wasn’t gonna do. I checked the crockpot and just flipped the roast. We decided we were going to eat about 3pm. I had plenty of crackers and cheese and veggies to snack on. At 2pm, I started the oven for the green bean casserole and carried on. At 3pm, the kids were setting the table and I checked the pot roast. What the heck? After almost 8 hours, it is still red. I decide that I am gonna risk it and taste it. UGH, this isn’t pot roast, this is corned beef. I made gravy and all these sides to accompany a pot roast and here we are with a corned beef. The good news is that my daughter will eat this and not pot roast, so this is a win. We thought about the meat and where it had come from and replayed things. I had gone to Restaurant Depot earlier in the year and gotten an enormous roast, corned beef, chicken and ground beef. I had gotten 90lbs of meet for $160! I had cut up and separated everything, but failed to LABEL anything, so we ended up with mystery meat for Thanksgiving. Normally, this would not have been an issue, I would have played it off and said, oh I thought I said it was corned beef, but since everything was semi-formal, it was a little weird, but everyone ate and was fine, but this is going to be a story. Remember that time you made pot roast, I mean corned beef for Thanksgiving? 

I am sure I am not the only one who has had Thanksgiving blunders. Please share yours. We all need some laughs.