Why We’ll Never Fry a Turkey Again

Ahhh, Thanksgiving…  a time of food, family, fun, and frazzled-mom freak-outs. Ladies, I don’t even cook, but with two kiddos under the age of 3, I’m more and more stressed each year. The planning, the prepping, the menu-creating, the hangovers, the cleanup, the home equity loan you have to take out in order to afford all those groceries (and the booze) —  it’s enough to send any holiday-prepper over the edge. I know, #firstworldproblems.

My husband and I always host my family at our house for Thanksgiving, and this year, with a 4-month-old and a toddler tyrant, I started thinking of ways to bump our stress level — and financial investment — down a notch. There are certain things we just can’t skip. Bloody Marys and orange rolls in the morning, white bread and mayo for leftover turkey sandwiches, Sister Schubert’s dinner rolls (one tray for me and me alone) —  these are the essentials. But what could we skip that would save us time, stress, and a giant chunk of change?

I thought and thought, and then it hit me like 25 pounds of poultry plopping into hot grease — we could skip frying the turkey!

If you’ve never fried a turkey, the overall process goes something like this:  Set up a giant pot and propane tank in your back yard, heat oil over an open flame, drop in turkey and fry for an hour, extract turkey from oil, let it cool, and carve it up.

Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. So, so wrong. Before you take the turkey/oil plunge, here are some things you should know, along with the reasons why we’ll never do it again.

Frying a turkey requires a large yard and the proper equipment. I’m talking a 50-gallon drum, perched upon a tripod with an open flame on uneven ground, and a propane tank. Open flame + handsy toddler = I’ll pass.

Frying a turkey requires no less than 800 gallons of peanut oil. If you think you’ve purchased enough, please be assured you haven’t. No joke, for the last three Thanksgivings, after already investing $100 in oil, someone in the fam has had to run to Walmart for more oil on Thanksgiving Day. Nothing busts up a good Bloody Mary buzz like a Walmart run. Trust me, people, you don’t want to do it.

Frying a turkey means that at some point, whoever is charged with this task will find themselves wrestling 20 pounds of slippery, awkward-to-carry bird carcass through your yard and attempting to “drop” it SAFELY into oil that is approximately the same temperature as lava. I’m sure they make proper tools to accomplish this feat; however, we do not own them. Therefore, my husband uses a combination of my brother’s assistance and a tool that resembles a pitchfork to “drop” our turkey into the oil. Sounds super safe, doesn’t it?  (Spoiler alert: The hot grease that splashed up on my brother’s face one year when the turkey slipped says IT ISN’T SAFE AT ALL.)

And lastly, frying a turkey means that even once you successfully wrangle the toasted bird back out of the grease pot, you are left with a silo of scalding hot liquid magma in your backyard. What does that mean? It means that you will spend the rest of your day arguing with your child about why she can’t go outside. It means that you will have to let the oil stay there long enough to cool. It also means that long after your Thanksgiving guests have gone home, you will still have a giant grease vat in your backyard. And there it will stay until you muster up the nerve to dump all of the — now very stinky — oil into a 20-gallon bucket that you had to go out and buy solely for this purpose. Finally, because your garbage men will not pick up a sketchy, sealed 20-gallon bucket, it means that an entire year later, you will still have a bucket of used turkey oil sitting outside your house by your garbage cans. #keepinitclassy

So this year my friends, it’s a no-brainer. We’re skipping the $1,000, insanely dangerous, wildly inconvenient, 14-hour time-suck that is frying the turkey and opting for the good ol’ oven. And you can find me with a Bloody Mary and my feet up, watching the little one play in our lava-free backyard. Cheers to keeping it simple this Thanksgiving!