For a number of years, one of my aunts and her family have had an established tradition of eating fried turkey at Thanksgiving — most years, turkey that they fried themselves. Of course, they applied every precaution to the process, but nonetheless this is a food product with something of an infamous reputation. So, last year, my aunt convinced my uncle to pursue what would seem to be an optimal solution to the problem — have the turkey fried by professionals who presumably knew what they were doing, thusly avoiding all the hassle and the chance of explosive turkey burning death.
At the appointed hour, my uncle went to the place of fried turkey to collect the turkey. As he got to the door, he was greeted by a firefighter — it seems that the fried turkey place had burned down, and more importantly that his turkey was therefore not available.
(The newspaper article on the event quoted the firefighters as being amused that many people apparently were still asking for their turkeys, in the hope that theirs might perhaps have been salvaged from the ashes of the place that cooked it.)
Knowing that my aunt, cousins, and grandmother were sitting around the table, knives and forks at the ready, and that if he arrived without a turkey to direct those knives and forks at he might be the alternate target (if there’s one thing my family takes seriously, it’s food), my uncle rushed off to the local grocery store just in time to grab the only turkey-related item they still had — a packaged turkey breast. For a family that uniformly favors dark meat.
This year, my aunt and uncle had smoked turkey.
Smoke Test Shack 