By Evan S. Benn
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — The first time Dr. Maria Elena Rhoads-Baeza cooked a Thanksgiving meal, she had some pots bubbling away on the stove, her pies were cooling on the counter, and her turkey was happily roasting in the oven — or so she thought.
“When it was time to put the green bean casserole in, I realized the oven wasn’t hot,” said Rhoads-Baeza, a St. Louis resident who works at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “I don’t know what happened. I think it had something to do with having too many things going on.”
Thanksgiving disasters — from uncooked birds to grease-clogged drains to kitchen fires — affect almost everyone at one time or another. They’re the moments that families dread but that first responders know to expect.
“Thanksgiving Day always brings the highest number of cooking fires,” said Kim Bacon, spokeswoman for West County EMS and Fire Protection District. “A lot of the calls we get are the result of unattended cooking. People say, ‘I only walked away for just a second.’ ”
Distracted cooks and alcohol also can prove to be a dangerous combination, Bacon said, especially when unfamiliar equipment like a turkey deep fryer comes into play.
The National Fire Protection Association frowns on using outdoor, gas-fueled turkey fryers. The gallons of hot oil and risk of combustion are too great to be considered safe, the group warns.
If you insist of having a crispy, fried turkey, Bacon recommended calling a grocery store or restaurant and asking them to fry the bird for you.
“Every year, we have people deep-frying a turkey on their porch, and a fire starts and extends into the house,” Bacon said. “We never want to see that. Talk about ruining the holiday.”
The day after Thanksgiving is typically the busiest day of the year for plumbers. The most common problems: garbage-disposal pipes clogged by grease and scraps, and toilets and showers backed up from overuse.
“Usually there is an underlying problem with the pipes, and then all these extra guests come over and tend to overload the plumbing,” said Paul Abrams, a spokesman for Roto Rooter. The 24-hour plumbing service expects to field about twice the number of emergency calls on Friday than it does on an average day.
“We’ve been telling people for years not to stuff everything down the disposal,” Abrams said. “So last year we started seeing an increase of calls from people who had flushed their scraps down the toilet, thinking that would work. No, no, no. That’s not the solution. Just throw it out.”
For other emergencies that might arise - say, a cable outage during the NFL games or a last-minute cooking question — there are hotlines to call for support.
Charter Communications staffs its call centers and online chat agents according to the volume of calls the company received on previous holidays, ensuring that help is available on Turkey Day. Dierbergs offers Thanksgiving tips, timetables and wine pairings on its website, and Schnucks keeps some experienced cooks on call in the customer affairs department to answer questions this week about food safety, cooking times and ingredients.
“These are some of the best and brightest people to answer all kinds of cooking questions,” Schnucks spokesman Paul Simon said. “We get a lot of calls about food safety. Certainly, improper food handling can lead to a memorable Thanksgiving of the wrong kind.”
For the types who want to avoid the potential pitfalls — and cleanup — of Thanksgiving, plenty of restaurants are offering holiday meals. Lei Jin, manager of the Mandarin House in Overland, said her kitchen will offer Thanksgiving dinner for the first time.
“We’ve had a lot of Wash. U and SLU students ask us if they can come eat here on Thanksgiving because they have nowhere else to go,” Jin said. “They are away from their families and want a good meal.”
Of course, Jin said, she also expects to serve a few people who may have messed up their home-cooked meal and are dining out as a last-ditch option.
“I don’t judge because that’s happened to me,” Jin said. “I once overcooked my turkey, so we went to a steakhouse for Thanksgiving that year.”
Rhoads-Baeza said an uncooked bird is less likely to happen to her now that she is more organized, writing out a prep list and timeline for everything she has to cook.
When she realized her oven hadn’t been turned on, Rhoads-Baeza salvaged the situation by picking up roasted chicken from a nearby convenience store and serving it with the potatoes, stuffing and pie she had already made.
“It worked out,” she said.
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