=+7.7† Everyday Application: Turkey and Thanksgiving: Every Thanksgiving, my wife and I debate about how we should prepare the turkey we will serve (and will then have left over). On the one hand, my wife likes preparing turkeys the conventional way: roasted in the oven where it has to cook at 350 degrees for 4 hours or so. I, on the other hand, like to fry turkeys in a big pot of peanut oil heated over a powerful flame outdoors. The two methods have different costs and benefits. The conventional way of cooking turkeys has very little set-up cost (since the oven is already there and just has to be turned on) but a relatively large time cost from then on. (It takes hours to cook.) The frying method, on the other hand, takes some setup (dragging out the turkey fryer, pouring gallons of peanut oil, and so on, and then later the cleanup associated with it), but turkeys cook predictably quickly in just 3.5 minutes per pound.

A. As a household, we seem to be indifferent between doing it one way or another; sometimes we use the oven, sometimes we use the fryer. But we have noticed that we cook much more turkey, several turkeys, as a matter of fact, when we use the fryer than when we use the oven.