Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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An Easy Bake Thanksgiving

Posted Nov 25, 2005 by Jeff Houck

Updated Nov 30, 2005 at 11:18 AM

Earlier this month, I posted about how I bought a Hostess Cupcake Oven and used it to bake Twinkies and Cupcakes at my desk at work.

But since we quickly ran out of batter and icing, in subsequent weeks we decided to try new menu items. We successfully made Easy Bake Nachos, Easy Bake Breakfast, Easy Bake Sausage Sandwiches and Easy Bake S’mores (using pancakes, Holiday Marshmallow Peeps and Leftover Halloween Candy).

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to my fellow pastry chef, Rommie, that it might be fun to try and bake an entire Thanksgiving dinner in it at my desk. He thought this was a grand idea.

So we set off across the street to the Publix on Bayshore Drive to shop for the best miniaturized foods we could find. Some $42 later, our menu was assembled:

Turkey (chunk, canned), yams with marshmallows, green bean casserole, Stove Top stuffing, Idahoan mashed potato flakes, microwave gravy, individual pumpkin pie slices, cranberry sauce, Toll House cookie dough and Asti Spumante.

The end result:

A lovely dinner with a waterfront view at Chez Tribune.

Suffice to say that not everything was as tasty as we had hoped. Sure the stuffing was great and the yams were delicious. So were the individual slices of pumpkin pie and the Toll House cookies. But the mashed potatoes tasted like something that came out of a diaper. The green beans were not full of what I’d describe as razzmatazz. And the turkey had a faint flavor of Soylent Green.

Rommie even had to apply the one-finger vom corking technique after less than a dozen forkfulls.

And, let’s face it, mistakes in judgment were made:

If I ever decide to become a rapper, my handle should be Squeezy-E.

To see a photo gallery of how we pulled it off (along with an auxilliary backup Easy Bake Oven I found at Goodwill and some emergency hardware modifications in mid-meal), click here.