We moved into our house right before COVID.  It has a cool retro kitchen, which we like in most respects.  But it had one minor problem: an oven from the ‘80s.  We thought it might be on its last legs, but since we really like hosting for the holidays, we didn’t want that to be a deterrent to hosting our first Thanksgiving in our new home.  We didn’t quite realize the magnitude of the problem, though.  The oven still “worked” in the sense that it produced lots of heat, but it had lost the capacity to regulate the heat output.

Not to be deterred, we dutifully bought a turkey and got to work.  We soon realized that this was going to be a slightly bigger problem than we anticipated.  We were hoping to cook the turkey at a very uniform 350 degrees, but our meat thermometer told us that the oven was generating heat ranging between 200 and 650, often at the higher end, and changing rapidly. We didn’t have many other options at that point, so we plowed ahead.  As best I can remember, our strategy mostly consisted of alternating between cooking the turkey at the prevailing temperature for a while, often around 500 degrees, and letting it cool down at irregular intervals before repeating the process.  Somehow my vegetarian sister wound up assuming primary responsibility for guiding the turkey through this process.

While we would absolutely not recommend this approach, the turkey wound up tasting just fine (turkey is graded on a curve anyway…), and we got a fun new story out of it.  And every year since then when we cook a Thanksgiving turkey, we are grateful for the miracle of temperature regulation in an oven that was manufactured in this century.