Butter Ball Hot Line

I was going to write a post about preparing your turkey for the holidays.  The closing line was going to be:

"If you do not have time to brine your turkey and do all of the other preparation work, then just go to your local grocery store and get a Butterball Turkey and work from there."

Then I ran across this newsletter from a friend and thought this would be a better post for the time.  So with thanks to John Graham —

Why is the Thanksgiving turkey such a mysterious creature? We eat it with the greatest of ease, but cooking it is another matter. Turkeys frequently come out overcooked, undercooked, and occasionally covered in edible pink glitter and body paint. (Trust me. I saw it on YouTube.)

That’s not the worst of it, though. Butterball hosts a hot-line that fields about 100,000 calls each Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some of those calls have been publicly disclosed because they’re just so funny. There have been documented calls from first-time turkey bakers who worried that the bird would rise like a loaf of bread when cooked. There have been frantic calls from harried hosts that cleaned their birds with metal scouring pads, and now needed help getting the metal bits out of the turkey. And there has even been a call from an aspiring cook who wondered how best to carve their bird with a chainsaw, and whether motor oil could be used to make a good baste.

But the following three anecdotes have to be the very best of the worst. They have been confirmed as real calls by the Butterball Turkey-Talk Line and Snopes.Com. As you read them, remind yourself that, no matter what you do, your turkey will probably come out better than the ones listed here!

“Dude, Where’s My Turkey?”

It’s not easy to misplace a turkey. But it happened to a caller from Colorado, who shoved her turkey into a snow bank to store overnight, as she had no room in her fridge. She called the Turkey Talk-Line to ask if it would be okay to eat the turkey after it had been stored thusly. However, she soon found that a heavy blanket of snow had fallen. The white, featureless landscape made it impossible for her to find where she had buried the turkey. We never learned if she recovered the bird. If not, well, at least the local wildlife had a nice buffet once the snow melted.

“What’s that Smell?”

A young mother once shared her tale of turkey woe. Apparently, her kids had been playing in the kitchen while she was stuffing the turkey. These kids were fond of matchbox cars, and had decided that their toys needed a new place to park. Many hours later, the mother discovered that the kids had chosen the turkey for their new parking space. It isn’t clear whether she discovered the toy cars immediately after removing the turkey from the oven, or if they were revealed during carving. Regardless, those turned out to be some hot, melted, and probably traumatized little vehicles. She should have entered a contest for the most creative stuffing recipe.

“Help! The Turkey Ate my Chihuahua!”

Speaking of things stuck in a turkey…

A Kentucky woman called the Butterball Turkey-Talk Line in 1993, asking how to get her Chihuahua out of a turkey. It soon became apparent that the tiny dog had dived right into the carcass and couldn’t get back out. Pulling the dog didn’t work. Shaking the turkey didn’t work. Finally, she was instructed to make the hole a little bigger so that the pooch could escape. It worked! At least she didn’t have to perform a C-Section.

Marge Klindera has been working at the Butterball hot-line for 25 years. She says that callers are usually very grateful for the advice they receive. And what do Turkey-Talk Line employees eat while they’re at work? Usually hot soup. Marge says it helps sooth their throats after all the talking.