Holiday dinner disasters: Oh sure, it's funny now

Thanksgiving afternoon had arrived by the time Virginia Duppenthaler, weary from a pre-dawn grocery run, awoke from what she'd intended as a catnap.

Her stovetop? Empty. The food? Hours from being done. And who was at the door but more than a dozen (ravenous) Thanksgiving dinner guests.

Major holidays seem primed for cooking mishaps. Turkeys catch fire in friers and scorch decks. Punchbowls of eggnog tumble onto spotless carpets. We run out of gravy, cracklings, butter, patience, time.

But in the way that cooking disasters often do, what should have been The Worst Dinner Ever often becomes the stuff of lore and legend instead.

In Duppenthaler's case, it didn't hurt that most of her guests were fellow chefs from the Blue Ribbon Cooking School & Culinary Center, which she owns.

"We all jumped in and started cooking and made the best of it. It was literally the best Thanksgiving ever," said her daughter, Vanessa Johns-Webster. "We still don't stop making fun of her for it."

To everyone who's ever forgotten a bag of giblets in the turkey, watched the bird collapse like a tired souffle or discovered too late that you switched your sugar with salt in the pumpkin pie, take heart: You are not alone. We collected the evidence via e-mail and telephone.

Jean Enersen, anchor, KING 5 News: "We almost always break the garbage disposal on Thanksgiving — could it be someone putting potato peels down there instead of putting them into the compost pot? So I called the plumber, because with 18 at dinner, I really needed the sink! The plumber came and worked on the project and I tried to keep things running smoothly in the dining room so no one would notice. But one of the littlest kids went out to the kitchen and saw two long legs sticking out from under the sink and went shrieking back to the dining room yelling, 'Daddy is having Thanksgiving under the sink!' Now every Thanksgiving we check the disposal, and make sure there are no extra legs under the sink."

Justin Branstad, Seattle cooking instructor: "Quite a ways back, a good friend of mine — their family owned a deli — had a big walk-in refrigerator, so I was always enlisted to help people cook. They also had a portly dog named Nugget, and the day before Christmas Eve someone had left the door a little bit open on the walk-in and the dog sneaked in there and gorged itself on an eight-pound ham ... We took poor Nugget to the vet, and they had to take care of her ... She was (eventually) fine, but the centerpiece of the meal was destroyed, so we ended up ordering out Chinese food for the Christmas Eve dinner. It was quite a scene, and as bad as it is having your meal destroyed, everyone was first and foremost concerned about the dog. You look back on it and laugh now, but it was quite an event."

Jeannine Dowell, of Kent, on one windy Thanksgiving in the late 1970s: Dowell was in the midst of cooking a hefty turkey and all the fixings for 30 when the power went out, a regular wintertime occurrence on the hill where she and husband Stephen live. She called her neighbor to see if she had room in the oven for their half-done turkey — nope. A friend up the hill said to bring the turkey on by. Stephen jumped in the car and drove up.

"He was carrying this 30-pound bird in a roasting pan in this windstorm," his wife said, laughing at the memory.

But that oven was too small, he told his wife over the phone. Yet another friend had no extra space in her oven. He drove home, perplexed. His wife went into panic mode.

"I said 'What are we going to do? We have all these people arriving at 4 o'clock. What are we going to do?!' " Jeannine said.

Then Stephen remembered he knew the owner of the nearby Golden Steer Restaurant.

"God love him, he cooked it for us," Jeannine said. "When my husband finally came home and the bird was placed on the table, he said to all of our guests, 'Well, this turkey has more miles on it today, on Thanksgiving, than it ever had in the barnyard!'"

Dennis Gallagher, owner of Gallaghers' Where-U-Brew in Edmonds, on a Christmastime blackout in the 1980s: "I was working at Big Sky Resort in Montana, and I was the sous chef and we were doing a Western barbecue and the power went out for about seven or eight hours. You had 800 people to feed, and we had the beans made up and this and that; we were semi-prepared. But nothing at this point was hot, and it was about 10 below zero. We had to dust off the snow from the barbecue. We finished all the food and fed 800 people on the four barbecues we had. That was kind of a disaster. But in my younger days, I handled stress pretty damn good."

Jean Asta Birkland, Seattle insurance broker, on the legendary 1983 Thanksgiving windstorm: "Everything's going fine. The turkey's in the oven, the potatoes are on the boil, we're working on things and our entire electric house goes dark, loses power.

It was about 2:30, so the turkey wasn't done. We generally just hung out in the dining room and drank wine and ate pie because there was nothing else edible. None of our food was done cooking yet. We sat there telling stories, forced to communicate with one another and chat, grousing about the dinner we'd lost and the nontraditionalness of this.

It was very strange, because about 7:30 the power came back on. And it was the weirdest thing because we didn't realize until the power came on that some magic was happening. It was a disaster at the time. But now we look back on it as all of our favorite Thanksgiving."

Karen Gaudette: 206-515-5618 or kgaudette@seattletimes.com