Even Martha Stewart has her off days in the kitchen. Unfortunately for her, one of those days was once Thanksgiving!
In a piece she wrote for MailOnline, Martha explained that she decided to host her first Thanksgiving 50 years ago, and she was expecting to be showered with praise. That's not exactly what happened. In fact, she nearly ruined Thanksgiving.
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The homemaking guru said she woke up at 3 am that morning many years ago to start prepping the meal.
"We had invited everyone for 1:00pm dinner, just like my mother, Big Martha, always did and as tradition demanded," she wrote. "I went back to sleep only to awake to a house full of black smoke — the turkey was burning!"
She remembered that she and her then-husband checked on the turkey, only to find it "hopelessly charred," she said. Her mistake? Martha said she preheated the oven to 500 degrees, then forgot to turn it down to 325.
Still, she knew she couldn't properly host Thanksgiving with just side dishes and desserts and no turkey.
"I started to cry while we drove back to the turkey farm, where luckily one lone thirty-pound turkey lay partially frozen in the walk-in freezer, a customer's forgotten order," she wrote. "I grabbed it, rushed home, and placed it under running water to thaw it."
Once everything was ready, she said, "I removed the stuffing from the inedible bird, stuffed the new turkey, and tried to withstand my guests' hungry looks until 7:00pm, when the turkey emerged glistening and golden, cooked to perfection – six hours late."
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Now older and wiser, the hostess-with-the-mostess realizes that food isn't the most important thing when it comes to Thanksgiving (although it helps).
"If the pie crust burns or the gravy lumps, what's most important of all is giving thanks for that gathering together of family and friends," she wrote.
