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Every Thanksgiving, in kitchens and dining rooms across America, concepts of time and space become distorted. Dinner tables elongate. A sprawl of folding chairs erupts into the living room. Suddenly everybody decides that eating dinner at 2 p.m. is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. In chaotic succession, the cooking events of the day unfold: Turkey in, stuffing in, stuffing out, green beans in, green beans out, oven temp up, turkey out, temp down, rolls in, rolls out, temp up, sides back in, sides back out.
There’s just one tool that can help us navigate the lawlessness of the alternate Thanksgiving dimension: a timer.
No, not the one on your phone or the one on your microwave. Since there are so many moving parts on Thanksgiving, you’ll need to set multiple timers at once. Using a collection of time keeping instruments (a magnetic timer on the fridge, and the timer on your phone, and the one on the oven itself) offers little help in taming the madness: Think of all of them, beeping at different intervals in discordant fury. Suddenly you can’t remember if the oven timer currently going off was set for the green beans or the sweet potatoes. You burn the beans and have al dente potatoes.
Instead, opt for a more graceful alternative: the multi-channel timer. I bought one last year and I’m never doing Thanksgiving without it again.
There are plenty of multi-channel timer designs available on the internet, and all likely work well if you need to set multiple timers at once. The magic of my particular multi-channel timer, though, lies in its attached white board. The timer’s screen displays a row of four different countdowns. On the whiteboard, next to the row, you can write what that line in the timer is set for—“TRKY! PIE! or PARNT ARIVNG GET DRESD!”—so there’s no confusion about which timer is set for which dish (or event).
I also like to write down the exact time dishes should be removed from the oven. This handy tool helps you keep careful track all in one place. Space is admittedly limited on the board, so I’ll write “T” for turkey across from the screen keeping the time for that dish, and then a 2:45 p.m. for the time it should be removed. That way, I can cross reference the timer with the clock in the kitchen. I’ll also know when all of the various dishes will come out of the oven, and can give lingering friends and family members in the kitchen a clear idea of when they can expect to sit down to dinner. Maybe this all seems a bit over-the-top, but time management is absolutely crucial to my Thanksgiving peace of mind.
This timer can also be particularly helpful when there are multiple people working in the kitchen, dashing around one another to take things on and off the stovetop. There’s none of that dreaded shouting from your aunt, “I put the stuffing in with 2 hours and 15 minutes left on the clock, remember to take it out at 1:15.” When you wield the power of this timer, you have an organized quartet of flickering digits in one tidy, consolidated location. Time may continue to fray; other cooks might succumb to the chaos. But within my mind and on my timer screen, there is firm control.
Eventually, guests arrive, the meal vanishes, and time slowly returns to its original rhythm. My multichannel whiteboard timer, having completed its valiant job, returns to its year-round home behind bags of coffee and a saltine box. Just like a fat separator, a roasting rack, or little ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like turkeys, a multichannel whiteboard timer isn’t an everyday sort of tool. But once a year, when that wormhole in the kitchen is thrust open, it emerges as just the thing I need.
