Turkey traumas Help lines hear it all when it comes to Thanksg

ST. LOUIS -- Concerned about cooking that Thanksgiving turkey?

Just keep in mind that if you don't slice it with a chain saw, stomp on it to make it fit in a pan, or lose it in a snowdrift, you'll do a better job with that holiday bird than some other Americans out there.

Cooks who have questions about how to prepare the seasonal feast have long been able to call help lines, offered by turkey producers, schools or others looking to provide assistance. But sometimes, the turkey traumas on Thanksgiving have even the experts stumped.

Mary Clingman serves as director of the Butterball Turkey Talk Line in Downers Grove, Ill. The help line, in its 24th year, has a seasonal staff of 52 employees with food-related degrees and expects to take more than 100,000 inquiries through Christmas.

Some of those callers stand out.

"We got a call from a guy last year whose turkey wouldn't fit in his pan. He wrapped it in a towel and stomped on it until it did," Clingman said.

Imaginative improvising

Another caller cut a turkey in half with a chain saw, then worried that oil on the saw might have transferred onto the turkey. A woman in Colorado who left her turkey outside in wintery conditions to keep it frozen realized she couldn't find it when more snow fell.

And one phone call began: "You don't know anything about kitty litter, do you?" Clingman said a wife called after her husband poured kitty litter on the bottom of a new grill in the hopes of absorbing drippings. Fortunately, the grill hadn't been lit yet, so the turkey was pulled off and cooked more conventionally, she said.

Kathy Bernard with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Meat and Poultry Hotline in Beltsville, Md., said a caller last year wanted to make her bird inside a roasting bag, but didn't have one, so had improvised. "She pulled a dry cleaning bag off her husband's suit, and it melted onto the bird," Bernard said.

The USDA's line is meant to help answer food safety questions. She said the staff of 10 has received several questions from people wanting to cook a bird and then bring it with them on their travels, usually to help a relative with the meal. That's usually all right for a short distance, but she said when a mother wanted to bring a bird from New York to a daughter in California, Bernard had to suggest that the parent just offer her child money to buy one locally.

Bernard said, too, that the hotline has gotten calls from widowers trying to cook Thanksgiving for the first time, or empty nesters looking to make a small meal and not a whole bird, as they had in the past.

Chris Whaley, a spokeswoman for Perdue in Salisbury, Md., said the oddest call in recent memory came from someone who wanted to defrost a bird by heating it with a hair dryer. That, she said, wasn't given the OK.

Whaley said people should keep in mind that the Thanksgiving meal can be as simple or as complicated as they'd like it to be.

"I do believe it's reassuring to know not everyone's done it perfectly over the years," she said.