Men like to cook outside.
I know that sounds like a sweeping generalization – my only defense is that it’s absolutely true. I have lived with a man for 25 years and in that time I have learned a few things about the opposite sex. Being outside puts men in touch with their caveman roots; it lets them hark back to a time when their forefathers wore animal skins and cooked their prey over an open fire. Most guys will admit that cooking outdoors somehow elevates simple food preparation to a manly endeavor, right up there with belching and fantasy football. If you ask my husband to boil water for pasta he will sulk like a four-year-old being sent to his room. But if you ask him to throw hamburgers on a grill, his chest will puff up and he will take a primitive, Tarzan-like glee in preparing that meal. This is a man with two post-graduate degrees, and yet his inner monologue goes something like this: “Meat good. Bob like meat.”
For my husband Bob, the end of summer does not signal the end of outdoor cooking. He will bundle up in down jackets and thermal underwear in order to barbecue comfortably during the colder weather. And now, with Thanksgiving approaching, he’s begun gearing up for his favorite of all outdoor meals: deep-fried turkey. It was seven years ago that Bob first discovered the ultimate outdoor cooking gadget: a turkey fryer that can cook a bird in no time flat. It had to be set up in the backyard, due to a scary and inconvenient tendency to burst into flames. My husband followed the directions carefully, but a quick Thanksgiving grease fire still cost him a burnt wrist and 70 percent of his eyebrows.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. We had driven to two separate supermarkets to find enough peanut oil to fuel this propane-powered monster. After the turkey was cooked and eaten, my husband and I looked at each other over a sea of dirty oil and shared one of those completely empty marital thought bubbles, each of us realizing that we had no idea how to clean up the mess (I wonder – is that how Tony Hayward felt?) The next day, when we tried to leave 12 bottles of oil out with the garbage, we were informed that our town does not recycle or dispose of cooking oil – we were on our own.
Looking back, I have to admit that this was the best turkey that has ever been cooked in my home (well, on my property, anyway.) The flesh was moist and flavorful with a delectably crisp skin. It was the only Thanksgiving we ever had where the turkey itself outshone its sexier sidekicks of stuffing and sweet potato casserole. But when my husband proposed deep frying another holiday dinner this year, it occurred to me to ask what had happened to the oil from our previous bird. Sheepishly, Bob led me down the back porch steps, and showed me the space under the stairs where 12 bottles of peanut oil have been quietly residing since November 2003.
We still have no idea how to get rid of this oil. I fully expect that someday we will pack up those bottles and take them with us to some nice assisted living facility. In the meantime, there will be no fried turkey at my house this year. And for that I give thanks.
Image: jemsweb