As Thanksgiving approaches, newspapers, mega-stores, and food producers have recently begun their annual advertising assault to get your turkey dollars. Yet I suspect that huge numbers of people are living in dread and anxiety because they're uncertain about how their turkeys will turn out. Some will produce turkeys that are a long way from being fully cooked, while others will produce overcooked, tough birds in need of resuscitation.

Has this been a problem for you? Do you follow a recipe to the letter, dutifully preheating the oven, timing the recipe precisely, only to have your dish come out nearly raw, or burned beyond recognition?

I suggest that for an investment of approximately $5.00, you can improve your chances for cooking well-roasted foods by 90%. Another investment of approximately $10.00 will bring your chances to near perfection. And when I use the term investment, I mean that your $5.00 will pay you dividends in the form of well-roasted food for the indefinite future. I'm talking about thermometers; specifically, oven thermometers.

If your oven is more than ten years old, the cooking temperature could vary-in the worst case-by as much as fifty degrees from the temperature you've set on the dial. So if a recipe tells you to cook a roast of beef at 375 F., you could be cooking at anywhere from 325 F to 425 F. and have no way of knowing, until you discover that when you remove your dish from the oven, what you've cooked is overcooked, undercooked, or somewhere in between. But not well cooked.

For approximately the price of a meal for one at McDonald's, you can feel assured that your oven is set at the temperature you're seeking, even if you've had to set the dial at 350 F. in order to arrive at a temperature of 375 F. The typical recipe that calls for, say, cooking something for fifteen minutes per pound, was very likely tested in an oven calibrated to cook at the expected temperature, or an oven fitted with an inexpensive oven thermometer.

Oven thermometers are readily available at the local chain hardware store, or in the kitchen gadget aisle at the local mega-store. The two most popular types, are coil (or dial) thermometers, and liquid, in which a colored liquid-usually alcohol-expands in glass as it heats, and registers the temperature on a scale. In both cases, the thermometers will have a kind of hook at the top that will enable you to hang them from one of the racks in the oven.

When you've bought your thermometer, it's a good idea to put it into boiling water for about five minutes, to see that it registers somewhere close to 212 F. If not, it may have some mechanism for adjustment, or you can simply return it to the store for another.

To test your oven's thermostat, hang the thermometer from the middle shelf, and pre-heat the oven to 350 F. If your thermometer reads 350 F. you're home free. But if the thermometer is, say, ten or twenty degrees off one way or another, try the experiment again, setting the oven to 375 F. If the temperature is off by the same factor, then you'll know to set the thermostat with that factor taken into account when you want a particular temperature; 360 F. in order to get 375 F., e.g.

Equipped now with an oven thermometer, and having calculated the necessary adjustment on your oven to produce the desired cooking temperature, I recommend an additional $10.00 investment in an instant-read meat thermometer. By inserting this type of thermometer into meats as they are cooking, it will provide you with-as the name suggests-an instant reading of the meat's internal temperature. This is an extremely useful device, because it helps you to account for the vagaries of cooking that go beyond simply knowing that your oven is set to the correct cooking temperature. Your standing rib roast of beef may look photogenic after two hours at 375 F., but until it reaches an internal temperature of 130 F. for medium-rare, it isn't fully cooked.

Gaining the confidence that your oven i