onions and turkey

Today I learned that pearl onions are tree onions, which would make them different from boiling onions, which are just little onions that grow in the ground.

In other food news, to make yesterday's heat PSA even more ridiculous, we got pea-sized hail this afternoon just as we were ready to put the turkey in the fryer in the back yard, so we had to cover the pot with a cookie sheet and wait it out. Cooking the bird went fine, but in oil news:

• The manual said to put the bird in the pot and fill around it with water to find out how much oil you need. Since you don't want to unwrap the bird the day before you cook it, people on the internet said you could do that with the bird wrapped, and that didn't work for us. We used 3 gallons of water, so we bought 3 gallons of oil. Today we repeated the experiment with the bird unwrapped, and we needed close to 4 gallons of oil. If I didn't have a bunch of rotation-friendly oils floating around in the cupboards, we'd have had to crush the turkey to get it all in the oil.
• Along the same lines, it appears that turkey-fryer pots are built with the expectation that you will fill it with one of those porn-star turkeys with the overdeveloped breast. Free-range turkeys are rangy in comparison, and, as a side note, I understand that they can reproduce without human intervention. The upshot is that even if your free-range turkey is under the weight limit for your pot, it could be both too big and too small for your pot. It will be taller and require more oil than a similar-weight freak of nature sold in a conventional grocery store.
• Since we got the oil to the correct temperature before we put the bird in, it didn't turn out greasy or anything. In fact, it tasted to me just like a roasted turkey, but I understand the breast was perfect, not that I tried it. As a dark meat fan, I will recommend deep-frying strictly for the entertainment factor. It's more expensive than roasting, and you can't stuff the bird, but roasting doesn't get you stories to tell about standing in a hail storm with a cookie sheet trying to keep water out of a pot of 350 degree oil.