Diary 286

Tuesday, December 29th

Turkey — It’s all behind us, right?  Not so fast….

I’ve a tale to tell.  This year, again, the turkey was done much later than anticipated.  I couldn’t understand it. It went into the oven on time. The National Turkey Federation had supplied a time scale for the turkey weight, and so I couldn’t go wrong, could I? Pushing a meat thermometer into a still-not-cooked turkey showed us that something was not quite right. But what?  The oven was almost new, and not a cheap one, either.

So the next day, as a pie was being reheated, I thad an idea. I dug into the kitchen drawer and pulled out a separate oven thermometer. It was an old model that clipped onto the racks and had the stains of years of use.  I compared the reading with the one on the fancy-dancy digital read out of the oven. Over 30 degrees difference. The oven claimed to be pushing 375 when it was barely producing 340.  But this was a new oven! How could this be? And yet – it was.

Trusting technology to do whatever it is it claims to do is not always realistic. Blindly believing whatever it is the latest source tells us may not always be the best option.