Happy Thanksgiving everybody! I hope you are enjoying the day spending it with family and friends, being thankful for all your blessings, and making memories that will last.

Whenever family gets together there are always stories to be created and memories to be shared. And there’s always something that doesn’t go as planned.

I want to share with you a Thanksgiving that I will never forget. Thanksgiving 2012. Or better known as the Thanksgiving of Plan B.

Family arrived at my house on Wednesday. Wednesday is the day a lot of casseroles are prepared, prep is done, and pies are baked. Before everyone arrived I’d baked the sweet potatoes for Papa’s Sweet Potato Casserole (SPC) and got that filling underway. What I failed to notice was that some delicious sweet potato leaked out of the potato and onto the heating element of the oven. (Lesson learned: I always put a sheet of aluminum foil on the rack below sweet potatoes when I bake them.)

Stuart’s sister arrived and was ready to get going on the pumpkin pie. She prebaked the pie crust before adding the filling and during that time the heating element cracked from the heat of the sweet potato deliciousness directly on the heating element, and a fire ensued. (A small fire, not the grease fire we created during the Bacon Wrapped Dates fiasco.) The moment of the night was my mother-in-law announcing, surprisingly calmly, “There’s a fire in your oven.”

At 8:40pm on Wednesday night we found ourselves calling all of the home improvement stores to see if they had the heating element part in stock – there’d be no way to get it Thanksgiving morning! We were out of luck. And we had to come up with a Plan B.

The pumpkin pie was finished in the toaster oven and the Pecan Pie was also made in the toaster oven Wednesday night. That toaster oven came in handy for crescent rolls on Thursday too.

A 22 pound stuffed turkey was not going to fit in the toaster oven. Luckily it fit in the grill – barely. We heated the grill to 350 degrees and treated it like an oven. The turkey was still in the roasting bag in the roasting pan. My brother elected himself as turkey-sitter. He kept running out into the chilly fall weather to ensure that the grill temperature stayed at 350.

While the turkey rested, out of the way in the oven! The casseroles went into the grill. All except for the SPC which wouldn’t fit. That had to be cooked in the microwave.

When we carved the turkey we realized that the half of the turkey towards the outside of the grill didn’t cook through all the way, but the half towards the inside of the grill was perfect. So half of the turkey was served with dinner while the rest returned to the grill for some more cooking.

Our Plan B Thanksgiving was a complete success and a cooking adventure I’ll never forget.

And the oven was fixed on Friday!