Rez students left without microwave following holiday mishap
Photo: CC, Bill Mubray, Edited by Kim Wiens
Several University of Ottawa students are counting their lucky stars after their Thanksgiving dinner plans went awry.
The students were trying to capture the festive holiday spirit on campus, since many weren’t able to go home this year. Witnesses have speculated that if reading week had been attached to Thanksgiving then this awful tragedy might have been avoided.
Putting their KD skills to use, the students decided to cook a full Thanksgiving meal in their communal kitchen, using the microwave to cook the turkey.
Turkey Cookers Association of Canada spokesman Spencer Cook released a statement earlier this month in hopes of preventing Thanksgiving-related accidents on campuses across the nation.
“We are happy to see young people so eager to celebrate Thanksgiving. The Association would like to tell the public that yes, it is possible to cook a turkey in a microwave, but only large ones with the special dimensions indicated in our chart. ”
However, the students didn’t follow proper turkey-microwaving protocol, leading to a small explosion, which has resulted in almost $10,000 worth of damage.
Having access to only a small residence microwave, and plagued with a bad case of the munchies, the amateur chefs disregarded this warning and cooked the large bird for two hours on high, flipping and rotating every 15 minutes.
“The turkey wasn’t fitting very well in the microwave so we cooked it one end at a time, with one of us holding up the other end,” said Duncan Radan a first-year history student, one of the students on the floor where the accident occurred.
“By the end of the 15 minutes holding that bird my arms were pretty sore,” said another student on the floor, Stephanie Bennett. “I’m actually kind of surprised that the door to the microwave didn’t fall off, we had it pushed open for so long.”
Luckily no one was injured after the blast rocked the residence room. “The burners and counters are covered with raw turkey. We found the wishbone lodged into the wall,” said Radan.
Students not involved in positioning the turkey into the common room appliance also made mashed potatoes, using plastic utensils that they had saved from previous shawarma poutine dinners to combine the ingredients. Bennett said, “The mashed potatoes were nice and creamy with just a hint of shawarma meat and gravy.
The group also had to use knives to open the cans of vegetables and cranberry sauce since none of them owned a can opener. “That took a lot longer than we thought it would. Who knew that cans were so hard to get into?” said Bennett.
The students agreed that they would not venture into the kitchen for quite sometime, opting to set up shop in the university’s 24/7 dining hall instead.
