Thanksgiving

Wow, I can't believe Thanksgiving has past and now Christmas is upon us! I still haven't posted fun pictures from Halloween.. oh well. The past two weeks have flown by! We had a wonderful Thanksgiving at my parents house, we had my parents (of course), Travis (bro)& Carly, my Grandma Weeks and us. Very small but soooo relaxing! As we were driving home, I realized I took NO pictures of our day. I was so bummed!

I can't pass up the opportunity to share our experience frying a turkey this year. I just wish I had taken a picture! Anyway, Brad and Travis had been wanting to deep fry a turkey, my mom agreed but decided to cook two turkeys. (Mainly because she wanted gravy and there is no way to get any juice from the turkey when you deep fry it.) We have deep fried turkeys in the past with great success so why would we think this year would be any different?! Well... it was! While getting the turkey ready to fry we asked Brad to figure out how many minutes it needed to cook based on the size. He is really good with math and so we trusted him....once again.. no problems with his math skills in the past. My mom and I with Brad's help cooked the side dishes, and Carly cooked her Tofurkey (she is vegetarian) and some yummy rice dish!

Meanwhile, Travis and my Dad were outside frying our turkey.. it takes a lot of skill to regulate the temperature for the turkey to cook evenly so they had to watch it the entire time. When it was time to take the turkey out we discovered it was still a bit undercooked, so we put it back in the fryer for a few more minutes.. we were not sure how long to leave it in so we all decided 20min would be safe. Well.. that was too long. When we pulled it out again it was burned on the outside which is how it should look but this was even worse. To make a long story longer.. we ended up only being able to eat half of it, the rest was too overcooked to eat. Luckily, my mom had cooked the 2nd turkey in the oven so we still had some wonderful turkey to enjoy. Usually the fried turkey is more moist and delicious - you should definitely try it sometime.

After discovering we had severely overcooked the bird, we asked Brad to recalculate the minutes.. I had told him to multiply 3 1/2 min and 17lbs to get the time.. apparently he only heard 3min and didn't calculate the additional 1/2 min. Oops! We should have only cooked it for another 8-9 min instead 20min. We learned a valuable lesson in communication that day - I can't ask Brad questions while he is watching football! :)

I hope you all had a wonderful turkeyday.. Anyone else have a good Thanksgiving story?