Camilla Luddington revealed that she once accidentally gave her friends and family food poisoning on Thanksgiving.
During the Nov. 25 episode of her podcast Call It What It Is with Jessica Capshaw, the 40-year-old actress recalled hosting a Thanksgiving dinner where things went very wrong.
“I didn’t grow up with it,” she said, reminding listeners that she born in the UK. “So I just got to inherit all of the Friendsgiving traditions around me. And I love cooking the turkey,” she began. “I say ‘cooking’, but really I get it from Whole Foods. I get the one that’s precooked because you just shove that bad boy in. You can’t go wrong.”
The reason she buys a precooked turkey is because she once tried to cook her own and it didn’t end well.
The actress — who stars as Jo Wilson on Grey’s Anatomy — said that she put the turkey in the oven for hours, but once it started getting too late, her guests were “over it” and ready to eat.
“It was like 10pm. I’m not even kidding, it was that late. I was like, okay, I’m taking it out. It is what it is. Whatever it has been cooked is cooked and we’re all gonna eat it,” Luddington said on the show. “And I thought, genuinely, there’s no way that people are gonna actually get sick.”
“I gave food poisoning that year to everyone that had a turkey. I’m not kidding,” she added. “I’ve never given food poisoning to anybody before, but people were throwing up that night.”
Capshaw teased that she’s “so glad” that she wasn’t there that year.
“They absolutely lie to you on the package for how long the turkey’s gonna take. Multiply that by 3,” Luddington quipped before Capshaw said she needed an internal thermometer “to be able to register the inside temperature of the turkey to understand if salmonella is not in your future.”
“100%,” Luddington agreed. “But the packet is assuming that you have the thermometer, and they’re saying, ‘Hey. Guess what? It’s a quick 3 hours for that 20-lb. turkey.’ And you’re like, great! So we’re having dinner at 4. I’ll put it in at 1, and it’ll be done… Lies. The turkey I got that year was an asshole and took, I don’t know, 12 hours.”