Fried Turkey Day

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Varya spent the prior day cooking several dishes and desserts before Thanksgiving afternoon when we grabbed a 14 lb turkey and my propane deep fryer and headed to Dad and Elaine’s Pearland palace to deep fry that bird and feast upon way too much food prepared by Varya, Elaine, and nearly 35 lbs of 375°F peanut oil.

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Deep frying, of course, produces relatively moist turkey meat with a crispy skin relatively quickly (less than 2 hours to heat oil and cook, cool and carve a big bird) and expensively (the peanut oil cost twice as much as the turkey). The result was worth the risk of an uncontrolled oil fire.

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Clearly Dad was most excited by dinner, as was one of their identical pair of super poopers, Micky or Ricky (I’m never sure which).

After several hours of frying, feasting, and fun (and the usual senior tech support reconfiguring TVs, iPads and iPhones), we headed home in a triptofan trance…

…only to begin my Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping online (never in person with the mobs). As savvy online shoppers are well aware, at least 95% of the “deals” advertised during the holiday season range from hype to misleading to useless, with obsolete models labeled “doorbusters”, limited bait to fill the store, rarely worth the time or money. So, as in recent years, I made a list of desired targets/presents and rely primarily upon TheWirecutter.com, my go-to product recommendation site throughout the year, to continuously distill and notify me of only the best deals–rare or unprecedented price cuts on the most highly rated products in various categories (less than 5% of advertised deals are worthwhile according to Wirecutter)–and jump when they highlight one of my targets as a recommended deal at Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Walmart, REI, Home Depot, etc. Supplementing Wirecutter wisdom are two of my favorite web browser extensions: The Camelizer to track past Amazon price history and send me alerts for a particular item (and confirm how good a deal it really is or isn’t), and Honey to search for all available discounts and coupon codes for a particular vendor’s web site. (SlickDeals is another price tracking/alert site I’ve successfully used in the past to find historic sales.) I’ve made heavy use of these shopping tools to save hundreds of $ over the last few days since deep fried turkey day, and will continue so through xmas.