How Not to Share Your Turkey Dinner

“Since you’re cooking that turkey anyway, why don’t we invite somebody over?” my hospitable hubby asked as he saw me wrestling the giant bird into the roaster. It was Saturday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend.

“Sure,” I said. “Call around and see who can come on short notice.”

He did, and soon we were expecting our friends Pat and Claudette for a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. As the afternoon wore on, it dawned on me that I could smell only the faintest hint of turkey. Shouldn’t there be a wonderful aroma wafting out the windows by now? I opened the oven. It was almost cold, the turkey barely half cooked.

Hubby checked it out. “Looks like the element is shot.”

Now what? Can’t get a repair guy on Saturday. Borrow a neighbor’s oven? Haul it over to my sister’s? Move the party to Pat and Claudette’s?

“Why don’t you cook it on the barbecue?” our son suggested as he headed out the door in search of a more interesting environment.

Hey, that’s not a bad idea. I lit the barbecue and loaded the turkey, roasting pan and all, inside. It just fit. I went back inside to peel potatoes.

When Pat and Claudette arrived, Hubby went out to check on the turkey. It should be done by now. It would have been too, had the wind not blown the barbecue out.

The guys moved the barbecue around to the sheltered side of the house and re-lit it. We’d just have to wait.

Next time we checked on the turkey, our propane tank had run dry. The turkey was far from cooked and we were all starving. Besides, the potatoes, vegetables, and stove-top stuffing were ready.

Claudette got an idea. “We’ve got all the trimmings. Why don’t you boys go pick up one of those rotisserie chickens from the Co-op?”

While they were gone, Claudette made a salad and I made gravy from the little juice the turkey had produced. Just when we were expecting the guys to walk in the door, they called.

“Co-op was out of chickens, so we tried Sobeys. They’re out, too. What do you want us to do?”

Fifteen minutes later, the boys came back with a bucket of KFC and we sat down to chicken with all the trimmings. Meanwhile, our original bird continued cooking outside with the propane the boys had brought back. By the time Pat and Claudette said good-bye that evening, the turkey was mouthwatering. That is, our mouths would have been watering had our tummies not already been stuffed.

We ate turkey leftovers, with thankful hearts, for a very long time.

 

AT LEAST I DIDN'T BURN 'EM

Forty-three years ago, on October 1, 1977, I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm and said “I do” to Jon Todd. He told me and everyone present that he did, too.

We traveled to Texas for a honeymoon that doubled as a scouting trip to the college Jon would be starting in January. Back home a week later, it made little sense to look for our own place for less than three months, especially when my parents offered to let us live in their motor home. It sat parked in their front yard, but it was ours—in the playing-house sense of the word.

As the weather grew colder, we stubbornly tried to maintain our autonomy, burning through tanks of propane to keep the furnace going.

While I had a job in town, Jon worked on his parents’ farm 45 minutes away. Often, suppertime came at nine or ten o’clock. One night, too exhausted to do a proper job of cleaning the motor home’s little kitchen, I tossed a pan of leftover biscuits into the cold oven to deal with the next day.

But that night, winter hit with a vengeance and our propane ran out in the middle of the night. Enough was enough. We hurriedly moved into a spare bedroom in Mom and Dad’s basement.

After Christmas, we loaded all our earthly belongings into my green 1974 Dodge Dart and headed for Texas as planned. Ironically, we could have survived nicely in a motor home through the Texas winter, but we found a furnished apartment we could almost afford and set up housekeeping for real. When the semester ended, we let the apartment go and returned to Manitoba for the summer. This time we rented a little house while we both worked on the farm.

One weekend, we joined my parents at the beach where they were camping in their motor home. It must have been their first camping trip of the season. We had barely climbed out of our car when my mother greeted me from the steps of the motor home.

“Terrie,” she called out. “Your biscuits are done!”

In her hands she held the pan of biscuits I’d left in the oven six months before.

I’m not sure what became of them after that. Maybe somebody commandeered them for hockey pucks. That pan of biscuits continued to bring us laughs over the years, albeit at my expense.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of biscuits I’ve made since then, but 43 years times three meals a day totals over 47,000 meals.

Doing an average of six loads of laundry a week for 43 years works out to 13,416 loads.

Weekly cleaning of bathrooms, and for most of these years we’ve had two, comes out somewhere around four thousand toilets cleaned. Not counting the decade I spent cleaning other people’s bathrooms.

No wonder I’m tired.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the biscuits. Though I rarely make them anymore, I’ve never found a biscuit recipe to beat this one. So in honor of our anniversary, I thought I’d share.

 BISCUITS

1 ¾ cup flour

2 ½ tsp. baking powder

¾ tsp. salt

1/3 cup shortening

¾ cup milk

Mix dry ingredients together first. Blend in shortening with pastry blender or fork until crumbly. Stir in milk, don’t over mix. Roll dough out and cut in circles with a biscuit cutter or glass. Bake at 450 degrees F. for 10-12 minutes. Makes 12. OPTIONAL: After the meal, return leftovers to the oven for six months. Write the story 43 years later.

“Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.” Proverbs 17:1 (NIV)

 

A Little Good News Today

Everybody needs a little good news. I’d love to tell you the pandemic is over or that our city is having a crime-free year or that cancer has been eradicated. Can’t say any of that and you wouldn’t believe me if I tried.

I do have a morsel of good news, though.

You may recall reading about my journey with a novel I titled Rose Among Thornes. In it, a young Japanese Canadian girl named Rose is relocated from her home in Vancouver to a Manitoba sugar beet farm during World War II. It’s also the story of Private Russell Thorne, a Canadian soldier who spends most of the war in a Japanese P.O.W. camp, wishing more than anything that he was still on his family’s sugar beet farm back in Manitoba.

In a blog post a year ago, I told about how I fought writing this book, believing it wasn’t my story to tell. How the idea wouldn’t let me go. How God showed me that it was mine to write, though it meant more research and study than I’d ever tackled. How I finally completed the 100,000-word manuscript, not knowing whether it would ever be picked up by a publisher.

Backtrack a bit further to spring of 2019. My agent encouraged me to participate in something called a Twitter Pitch. I hate Twitter. I can’t make sense of it and rarely use it. But I had three different stories to pitch, one of them Rose Among Thornes. I wrote four different pitches for each book (12 in all, each limited to 280 characters) and added appropriate hashtags. Then, as the rules allowed, I tweeted these pitches, scattering them throughout the twelve-hour window of opportunity. Here’s how it works: if any editors are interested in seeing more, they “like” your pitch, which is an invitation to send them more information about your book.

I didn’t get one “like.” Not one. I thought I must be messing up with the technology, but when I tweeted a question, one of the organizers confirmed I’d done it correctly. So much for Twitter pitches. I chalked it up to a dreadful waste of a day.

In reality, I guess it was a case of right place, wrong time.

When a whole year went by and my agent still hadn’t found a home for any of these novels, I initially ignored the Twitter pitch when it came around again this past June. Why waste my time? But for some reason, I changed my mind—with stipulations. I would pitch ONLY Rose Among Thornes, and I would use the exact pitches I’d used the previous year. I didn’t want to waste a minute reworking them, and I didn’t know how to improve them in any case.

I anticipated zero responses because, as we all know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting different results.

I may need to redefine insanity.

By the end of the day, five editors had “liked” my rerun pitches.

By the next day, two had asked to see the full manuscript.

By the following week, I was offered a contract.

And so, my good news is, Rose Among Thornes is set to release from Iron Stream Media next summer. I’m more excited to see this book in readers’ hands than anything I’ve written.

The lesson here? God’s timing. There’s no earthly explanation for why my same old Twitter pitches should have generated interest in the midst of a pandemic when they had not done so in 2019, except for one truth. It’s wrapped up in Habakkuk 2:3. “But these things I plan won’t happen right away. Slowly, steadily, surely, the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, do not despair, for these things will surely come to pass. Just be patient! They will not be overdue a single day!” (The Message)

I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but take heart. You can trust God’s timing. He’s never late. He knows best. He’s on your side.

Take it from my little bit of good news.