In fewer than 24 hours I will be enjoying an overdose on my favorite chemical, tryptophan. This delicious little amino acid is found in turkey meat and is a natural sedative. This may explain why I will be unbuttoning a few buttons and taking a little doze on the couch before dessert.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays and November is one of my favorite months. The weather gets really cold (I could see my breath Monday) and Clark W. Griswold begins to grace the screens of sub-par cable networks across the country.
I know you ladies from the Midwest think I'm a sissy, but you'll be wearing skirts till March and I need more then Uggs to stay warm.
Peta.org says that over 45 million turkeys will give their lives so that we can all eat until we explode, and I'm proud to say that I will be consuming at least three of them. My mom knows I like her turkey the best, so she'll make me one even though we're eating at my aunt's house this year.
I'll have another one at my aunt's and then my dad will cook one in his deep fryer. While this routine will probably qualify me for a few of the seven deadly sins, I'm OK with that.
The deep fried turkey is my favorite adaptation to the Thanksgiving holiday not only because it tastes good, but also because it provides a chance for the men to do something besides watch the sorry excuse for football that will be the Bears and the Cowboys this year.
My dad experiments every year with new combinations of marinades, mainly consisting of a few different kinds of alcohol (tequila, Coors Original) a few choice spices (habaneros, more beer). When they're all combined and injected into the turkey, they end up tasting terrific.
The beauty of frying a turkey (besides the fact that it is fried, which is the best way to cook any food) is the piping hot oil cooks the turkey evenly on the inside and out, so you don't have any of the normal turkey dryness; instead you get a beautiful, golden brown, beer-marinated bird.
Allstate Insurance reports that 15 homes burned down last Thanksgiving because of the increasing popularity of turkey deep fryers, and I'm sure that trend won't go down any time soon. But with a craze so delicious, why should it?
Infoplease.com suggests that tomorrow America will consume 583 million pounds of cranberries, 1.3 billion pounds of sweet potatoes, 791 million pounds of pumpkins and that the average American will eat 13.8 pounds of turkey this year -- most of it on Thanksgiving.
While these may seem like gigantic, gluttonous figures, rest assured there are a few people like myself who are inflating these numbers by being absolute pigs.
So tomorrow, while you're gorging yourself with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, cranberries, pumpkin pie and your father's finest single malt scotch: root for ASU, take a nap on a couch, get drunk with your family and be thankful for a happy holiday.
Adam Wright is a journalism senior. Send him canned yams at adam.wright@asu.edu.
