Butterball for Thanksgiving

     Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. All it asks of us is food and gratitude. No need to buy gifts, just groceries. Those come already wrapped. Decorating is usually confined to the dining room. And since cooking for people is my love language, Thanksgiving is an endorphin feast for me. Naturally, I served turkey, but that is not the butterball the title refers to. The butterball formed when the butter in my Toll House pie ran over, burned on the bottom of my oven, and turned into a smoke bomb. How could something that tastes so good smell so bad? I removed the pie as early as possible, but by then the damage was done and the turkey was not. Not only could I not turn off the oven, I had to turn it up 25 degrees to cook the carrot souffle and glazed yams. When I opened the oven door, it belched out tear gas worthy of Macgyver. As in, "We need a weapon! Forget the household chemicals, do you have any butter?"
     So, in the spirit of making our home welcoming (ala Martha Stewart), we opened the doors--and several windows. Martha, no doubt, would have used more decorative fans to dispel the smoke than we did, and probably would have come up with a better party theme than crematorium. Thank goodness I decided to cook the turkey in an oven bag. Butter is good. Smoked turkey is good. But butter smoked turkey is not. The house still smelled a little funky when company arrived, but the food and conversation were good. One of the discussion topics was ways I might use my oven's self cleaning feature without creating a flambe feature. You Tube had videos of people using baking soda to clean their oven, but being both creative and lazy, I used Coke. It loosened enough of the bitter butter to use the self clean cycle without having to stand by holding a fire extinguisher.
     Thanksgiving is still my favorite holiday, but note to self for next year--Use deeper pie plate for the Toll House pie. Then maybe next year the butterball can actually be the turkey.