(Also posted on Facebook.)
On this 2021 Thanksgiving I was remembering the first bird I ever cooked. I was in Grad School away from home. I carefully placed the bird in the pan, dutifully covered it with cheese cloth and basted it with butter as instructed by my mother. I cooked it the requisite time to a beautiful golden glaze, took it out of the oven, and proudly set it on a platter on the dinner table ready to carve as I’d seen my father do a zillion times.
My roommates sat around the table, eagerly awaiting to eat my masterpiece. I started to sink the carving fork into the bird and . . . the fork bent. The bird was hard as rock. Just then my mother called and I told her what was going on. Her comment: “Did you defrost it first?”
Steve's Memoir 