Happy Thanksgiving
My view of Thanksgiving was skewed by my Father’s attitude. Having grown up on a poultry farm, he saw the holiday as the culmination of weeks of work “processing” dozens of turkeys to be frozen and readying a few dozen more for fresh delivery. We generally ate ham when he was alive.
Having been on my Grandfather’s farm at this time of year I can understand my Dad’s attitude: our meal was subject to interruption by people picking up a fresh turkey at the last minute. A sale is a sale when you are business for yourself.
Thanks to Fox the WKRP turkey drop isn’t readily available on YouTube, although Hulu apparently has it. Watching it was long a tradition at our house.
Enjoy your meal and try to forget about the world’s problems for a day – they’ll still be there on Friday.
11 comments
for the first time in several years I’m actually going to eat turkey today. fortunately somebody else is doing all the cooking and I’m just sitting here at the computer as all the aromas fill the house.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all! And as God as my witness,I thought turkeys fly. (the best bit is on youtube.)
The cats are getting something called ‘Turkey & Giblets Paté’, while mine is coming on a plate from a friend whose daughter is having to cook it all, so we both made out.
Real wild turkeys can fly, Ellroon, but the white domesticated turkeys are too breast heavy to get off the ground and use their wings to beat up small children when they aren’t pecking them. Yes, that is the line that my Father laughed at every time, even though he knew it was coming.
Even if you don’t eat it yourself, it is good to eliminate domesticated turkeys. It makes the world safer for small children whose grandfathers raise them. 😈
Funny, isn’t it Bryan, how people raised on farms tend to be a lot more realistic about the ‘World’ than most city bred ‘conservationists’ etc. 😉 Whilst I was raised on a dairy farm, we had poultry and pigs and fruit & veggies. When I was a wee lad, my job was to collect the chicken eggs before school. When a chook stopped laying, she became Sunday dinner. 🙂 It’s reality. Probably one of many reasons I’ve never been squeamish. I do miss not being able to go pick fresh fruit or vegetables when they were ready. Loved peas straight from the pod, and cucumber’s, tomatoes etc. I’d grab a cucumber & apple to munch on the way to school. 🙂 And for the record, they most definitely tasted better than the majority of supermarket crap today!
One of the reasons I moved out here, was because of the local farms and orchards, and the Sunday farmer’s markets. Supermarkets are crying poor because their sales of (laughingly called “fresh”) produce is dropping. why the hell should anyone pay 3 times the price — or more — for something that tastes half as good, and has the actual nutritional value of cardboard, when they can get the real thing? We even get people from the city at the farmer’s market’s, a 2 hour drive (used to be over 3, but the new freeway made a big difference).
It’s funny, we don’t do “thanksgiving” of course, yet the supermarkets all stock up on turkey products. They usually end up selling them for half price eventually. Crazy.
I’ll probably get some turkey thighs for soup next week, because they will be dirt cheap. The dark meat has some flavor, but not the flavor of my grandfather’s birds. His birds were fed on crops that he grew, including things like broccoli and spinach in addition to grains, while today’s commercial turkeys have no variation in their feed and taste like the cardboard they eat.
Supermarket produce is picked before it is fully ripe, and a lot of it is for varieties that are hard to bruise in shipment, not because it tastes good. Most of the ‘insect resistant’ varieties are insect resistant because bugs don’t like their taste – even bugs know what tastes good.
“The cats are getting something called ‘Turkey & Giblets Paté’,”
mine too! except for the two who absolutely won’t eat that flavor – they got liver-and-chicken pate.
There are always cousins who want cornbread dressing and marshmallows on the sweet potatoes. Just another aggravation of getting stuck with Thanksgiving dinner, even if it is only for the cats. I’ll bet not one of the cats even offered to roast the turkey, or even baste it 😉
“… or even taste it”
oh wait, you said ,baste, not taste. 😀
actually most of mine don’t recognize human food as food. I’ve got one that loves chicken-cooked-the-way-humans-like, and 2 or 3 others that are mildly intrigued by the idea, but mostly they’re just plain suspicious of anything that isn’t that one flavor of that one brand of dry crunchy stuff that comes out of that one color bag. it took me forever to convince them to eat canned food, but it’s a bit of a challenge to hide medicines in the dry crunchy kibbles so I persevered.
I used to think they were just stupid, but I can see how sticking to one, known, proven, safe food item could be a survival advantage, especially in an environment where the humans are lacing the food with poison (which is how I ended up with a houseful of cute little wild animals).
“There are always cousins who want cornbread dressing and marshmallows on the sweet potatoes.”
isn’t that the truth. marshmallows on sweet potatoes, that’s sacrilege, but I love love love dressing, or stuffing, or dressing AND stuffing, cornbread or bread crumbs or bread cubes, with or without sage, or onions, or mushrooms, or sausage….
Cats are very picky about what they eat, which is why I always deal carefully with any ‘gifts’ they leave for me as they may be poisoned or diseased. You also have to be careful about changing kibble, because half the time not even the ferals will eat it, so you end up feeding possums.
It’s the cooked part they don’t seem to like, but I’m not putting out raw meat from a grocery store given all the recalls we’ve had.
The problem with cornbread stuffing is what kind of cornbread? White or yellow, sweet or not, is a big problem. I’m used to yellow sweet cornbread, but the majority around here wants unsweetened white. But I like stuffing in preference to mashed potatoes any day of the week, and use it with pork more often than poultry.
Yellow sweet cornbread isn’t cornbread, it’s corn cake. You might as well put icing on it :).
– Badtux the Southern Penguin
When you grind sweet corn, you get sweet yellow corn meal. Given the necessity of having sweet corn as the basis for certain local potables without having to add a lot of sugar, you bake with what you have, not what you would like to have.