Easter Smokehouse Turkey

Still catching up on posts here… So on Easter Sunday, we were supposed to pick up Jordin from his Dad’s house after church so that we could head over to Mom and Dad’s for Easter Dinner. I got up early and got the Easter stuff together so that I could go and set up an Easter Egg hunt for Jordin. We figured that we’d just show up at Mom and Dad’s and act all surprised that the Easter Bunny had left Jordin eggs and a basket.

So I drove up to Allen around 10 am… As I got up to the door, I noticed that the security alarm was going off, and thought to myself “hm, self… whaddya think it is? Mayhap someone left the garage door open…” I unlocked the door and pushed it open, only to be assaulted by billowing smoke! I could barely see through to the back of the house from all the smoke.

All I remember at that point was that I knew I had to get their dog out of the house. I ran in, trying not to breathe… scanning around quickly to see if i saw any flames… Poor Coco was huddled down in her crate, so I reached in and grabbed her and ran out the back door. I whipped out my phone and called Dad and said something about him needing to leave church cause the house was full of smoke and most likely burning down… Then I called 911…The fire truck got there pretty fast… I told them what had happened and they opened the front door –- as soon as they saw all the smoke, they stopped and put on all their breathing gear…
After spending about half an hour searching through the whole house (including the attic), they figured out that Mom had left the giblets cooking – the liquid had all burned out and the turkey neck caught on fire, filling the whole house with smoke – luckily I showed up when I did, or who knows… maybe the whole house would have gone up in flames…
Luckily the turkey wasn’t harmed, so we still got to have Easter Dinner (sans giblet gravy). Mom and Dad ended up having to get a cleaning service do some smoke treatment to the house to get rid of the smoke smell…

Interesting side note – even though I was almost coughing out my left lung when the firemen showed up from my amazingly brave canine rescue heroics, not a single one asked me if I was ok…

At least the studly pictures of me in my “kid from the Christmas Story” days were completely unharmed (ugh)…