Turn your Pumpkins into Turkeys

If you have any pumpkins left over from Halloween, now's a good time to transition them into the next holiday.

I got this great Thanksgiving Pumpkin Turkey Making Kit last year to use with my pumpkin. My kids hated it, but I love it! (And it furthers my career as a parent destined to embarrass two teenagers).

Gobble gobble!

*Warning - this post contains a link to an affiliate program that might make me money, wherein I use said $ for giveaways and suchlike.

Stay away from enhanced breasts

I actually have a breast enhancement post in the works but I thought, since many of us are sitting down to unnatural breasts this Thanksgiving, I'd write about it now. No, I'm not talking about Hollywood stars (unless movies and TV are on your t-day schedule), I'm talking about your turkey. The majority of us eating turkey are eating either a bird that has been bred for huge knockers or has been unnaturally inflated with plumpers to expand their breasts.

What's the problem with this? Well, for the injected plumpers, you aren't paying for and eating turkey, you are paying for whatever they are injecting, most likely a mixture of saline. Just like a boob job, but without the implants. If you like the taste of watered down meat, then it's no big issue I suppose. You could get the same effect by brining it yourself at a lesser cost.

Add on top of this these broad-breasted bird are bred for big boobies, which means that their anatomy isn't well suited for, well, moving around. They are more prone to tipping over and not getting back up. This is a huge problem if they have access to open water and fall in, because their giant racks prevent them from righting themselves and they drown.

I know that there is a myth that turkeys are stupid animals, but when you look back at native wild turkeys, they were pretty damn smart and nearly impossible to hunt. We've bred the life-force out of them over the years, built to our specifications for dining, altering their anatomy such that their quality of life just ain't what it used to be. So, today, we have a factory mill of dumbed down turkeys, who need artificial insemination to reproduce because they forgot how.

What's the solution? Choose heritage turkeys that aren't bred for big boobs. These animals are the closest thing we've got to preserving a domesticated turkey without all the anatomical weirdness. Sure, they are harder to find since there aren't as many people out there raising them and they are more expensive than even the organic, free-range or pastured broad-breasted birds. But, if we create more of a demand for heritage turkeys, the supply will increase.

You don't need a freezer full of free and/or cheap-ass turkeys given away during the holidays because the cost to produce them is negligible (and reflects on their care and feeding). You don't need a 20 pound turkey to feed 4 people. If cost is an issue, choose a smaller bird of higher quality for not only your sake, but the turkey's. And, when in doubt, forgo the turkey altogether and choose either vegetarian or an animal that has been given the dignity of a decent life.

Local Thanksgiving Menu

I met with my brother today, Mr. Chef Extraordinaire and writer of the blog, Seattle Foodies, to go over the menu for Thanksgiving. As usual, we'll be having something spectacular this year, with a focus on local ingredients. In other words, if it can be found locally, it will be consumed.

Here's what's on the menu:

• Turkey leg confit in duck fat*
  
• Roasted turkey breast with gravy*
  
• Peas and pearl onions
  
• French mashed Yukon gold potatoes**
  
• Root vegetables (local) with sage from the garden
  
• Cranberry, blood orange and thyme relish***
  
• Porcini Mushroom Stuffing
  
• Assorted Dinner Rolls (from the Dahlia Lounge Bakery)
  
• Pumpkin pie****
  
• Pecan pie

*Our turkey, once again, this year is a pasture-raised heritage turkey from Thundering Hooves
**I wish the potatoes were from my yard, but I didn't have much potato success this year due to my own negligence. But, the potatoes are, at least, local
***The cranberries are grown locally in our area and the thyme is from the garden
****The pumpkin pie is made from locally sourced leaf lard in the crust with local butter, and local pumpkin puree that I made earlier in the season

Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to list some of the reasons why eating local is important. Not only does it help support local farmers and the economy, it also will help reduce your carbon footprint given the fact that most of your food has travelled, on average, 1500 miles to reach your plate. Or, as they say, from farm to fork.

Eliminating those food miles by buying locally grown foods will not only reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere during transportation, but it will ensure that your food is fresher and, more importantly, tastier. You see, if your food doesn't need to travel thousands of miles and spend time in storage, it can be picked closer to its peak of ripeness. And, therefore, peak of tastiness.

How's your Eat Local for Thanksgiving planning coming along?

By the way, congrats to the 5 winners of the locally sourced heritage turkeys!

Pledge to Eat Local for Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and do you know where the food for your family feast is coming from? Hopefully, you have access to local foods and will be choosing meats and produce grown local to you.

Why is it important to eat locally? Well, I'll let the info from the Eat Local for Thanksgiving site explain a few things:

By making a choice to include more local foods into your diet you are taking an important step in support of a local food system that can feed your community while protecting the environment and building a vibrant local economy.

Research indicates that locally directed spending contributes as much as 2 - 3 times more to community income than spending at non-local businesses. At farmers markets, for example, for every dollar spent, 62 cents is re-spent locally. For every dollar spent at an average grocery store, 25 cents is re-spent locally compared with 52 cents at a locally-based grocery store.

The increase is even greater for locally-based restaurants. For every dollar spent at an average restaurant, 31 cents is re-spent locally compared with 79 cents for locally-based restaurants.

It's also been said that one of the best ways to keep farmland from being developed for commercial use is to expand demand for local-grown produce, creating a higher value for those lands as active farmland.

What more can you do about it? Well, you can join thousands of others who are willing to take the pledge to eat locally this Thanksgiving, even if it's only one item on your table that you choose to replace.

Taking the pledge is a good first step in helping to build a more vibrant and sustainable local food system for your region. There are many important issues that affect the availability of and access to local food. If you would like to get involved further here are a few things you can do to help the cause:

Ask friends, family and other groups you are associated with to take the pledge. Direct them to the Eat Local Thanksgiving website to learn more.

Talk to the manager at your local grocery store and ask them to carry more local produce, meats, dairy products, or other locally produced goods.

Write a letter to your city council, county council or state legislators to let them know that you support policies such as Farm to Institution (i.e. getting local food into school and hospital cafeterias).

Also, don't forget that getting everyone together is a great time to explain to friends and family why you choose local foods. If you need some tips on what to discuss, check out these great discussion questions from the Eat Local for Thanksgiving site.

If you made it this far, what are you waiting for? Go take the pledge already!

[Please note: out of area pledges are not eligible for prizes upon entering. If you do not live in WA state, just enter your city, state in the city field.]

Order your holiday turkeys now

Turkeys? In the middle of summer? No, I'm not nuts. If you have any interest in sharing a heritage, pasture raised turkey with your family this holiday season you have to think ahead. And, I'm not talking about a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I'm talking now. In fact, in some areas you may be already too late.

Most farms that hand raise your very own special bird needs your support and order now so they not only know how many to raise, but they need to start doing it now so that they are ready for the holidays. It's not like turkeys magically appear in November, although it certainly seems that way with our current food system.

Why bother with this harder to find, more expensive bird? Well, flavor for one. Pasture raised heritage birds taste a whole lot better than your generic supermarket broad breasted bird that can't walk and forgot how to have sex. Your heritage turkey will undoubtedly have had a more peaceful existence munching on bugs, grubs and vegetation rather than antibiotic-laced turkey feed.

From the Seattle Times:

Turkey used to have taste. But that was before turkeys were genetically honed to be not much more than a giant hunk of white meat on stubby legs. Today's conventionally-raised turkey is a freak of nature that, left on its own, would not live a year.

Most turkeys eaten by Americans today are a single variety: the Broad-breasted White. It's a bird bred to grow fast, with huge amounts of breast meat. It's so top heavy in the cleavage it can't walk right; the most it can manage is a waddle. It can't fly, jump or run. And it's so corpulent and misshapen the poor thing can't even copulate; Broad-breasted Whites have to be artificially inseminated.

Where do you find a farmer that sells heritage turkeys? Well, Local Harvest is a good place to start. To read a taste test of a range of different turkeys (from Butterball to Heritage), check out this NY Times article.

Think a heritage bird is too expensive or too fussy? Well, the price of these turkeys represents the true cost of raising an animal in a humane and appropriate manner, rather than an industrialized, genetically modified affair (and by that I mean bred for boobs rather than flavor). So, if the price is too high for you, buy a smaller bird and skimp in other areas. Do you really need all those other dishes and pies anyway?

Okay, now get back to your summer filled with watermelon, blackberries and lemonade...

Turkey post-mortem

With all this yackety-yacking about my pastured heritage turkey, there seemed to be some interested in doing a follow-up or, post-mortem, on what we all thought of the turkeys we chose.

This was the first time we got a heritage bird that was pasture raised. In the past we have gotten organic "free-range" turkeys that have always tasted a lot better than the standard commercial butterball style turkey. This year's turkey was just as moist and tasty as the basic organic bird, but its anatomy and flavor was totally different.

There was quite a bit of meat on the bird and it was more like pork than turkey. It wasn't flavorless like your average turkey and it had an amazingly thick layer of subcutaneous fat on it, which made it super-moist. I'm not sure if that's because of the breed or because it was pasture raised. Not too surprisingly it didn't have humongous breasts, but they weren't paltry either and it had a good bit of meat on the legs. The most striking thing was how sturdy the carcass was - probably because it spent all its days running around on a farm.

For those of you who tried out a turkey you hadn't had before (organic, heritage, wild, free-range, pastured, etc.), did you notice a difference? If you spent extra money getting a more high-falutin' bird, would you do it again?



Don't forget - you still have time to enter my Thanksgiving giveaway. It's too hard to pick just one of you so I think I'll do a random draw. So, if you've not entered because you didn't want to "compete", don't worry about it. You'll have an equal chance.

Talking Turkey for T-Day

It's been getting around the parents at my son's school that I bought a $95 turkey for Thanksgiving this year. The consensus has run somewhere between general disbelieve and the statement that my turkey sure better be laying some golden eggs to justify the expense. So, let me back up and explain.

Late last spring I heard a local farmer discussing his pasture raised beef on our local NPR station. The farm, Thundering Hooves, also offers pasture-raised, heritage turkeys, but you'd better get your act together because they sell out as soon as they go on sale in July.

Who wants to think about Thanksgiving in July? Well, I for one, and it certainly appears that plenty of others do as well. So, we dutifully ordered our turkey as soon as we could and have been diligently waiting ever since. The turkeys were processed a few weeks ago and we picked ours up last weekend. We'll be roasting it rather simply since we want to be able to really taste the meat and see how it compares to the standard breeds.

How's it heritage?
This bird is a rare heirloom Unimproved Standard Bronze. Thundering Hooves keeps their own flock and so the eggs are produced and incubated on site (rather than chicks purchased from another grower). According to their website:

"... there are extremely limited numbers of breeding flock [of unimproved turkeys] left in the country. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy estimated that in 1987 there were 'less than 300 breeding hens' found in America with the possible exception of a limited number of turkeys used by hobbyists and show goers."

These birds are becoming endangered simply for the fact that turkey growers are breeding birds that have larger amounts of white meat. I'm sure you've heard of some commercially grown broad breasted birds that are so busty they can barely walk and are so far removed from nature that they don't know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated in order to breed. A more thorough examination of the issues with commercial turkeys is made in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Out to pasture
Most commercially grown turkeys are raised in confined and cramped quarters, given little access to the outside (if at all) and are fed a limited and unnatural diet. This makes for a very low-quality life for the turkey and some argue that it results in a less flavorful and nutritional meat.

Pasture raising is a method of raising flocks that is more than just "free range", which generally means that the birds have access to a small outdoor area that they may or may not actually use. On the other hand, our pasture ranged turkey roamed freely in the fields, eating bugs, grasses, and vegetarian feed. The birds on the farm are free to roam about as they please and their roosts are periodically moved throughout the field. This is generally referred to as pasture rotation and it allows the birds access to new areas of grass and bugs for their dining enjoyment.

Eat Local for Thanksgiving
Not only was it important for us to purchase a turkey that is raised sustainably and preserves a heritage breed, but it was important for us to buy local. Each year I host an Eat Local campaign urging individuals and families to choose local foods for their Thanksgiving table. Not only does it help support local farmers, but the reduction in transportation of foods also results in lower carbon emissions, some say as much as 2.2 lbs of CO2 per plate of local foods chosen.

So, if you are interested in joining the movement to Eat Local for Thanksgiving, stop by and sign the pledge!

[Don't miss out! The book giveaway for Eco-Friendly Families is still going on until 6:00 pm tonight!]

Eat Local for Thanksgiving 2008

It's that time of year again and it's not too late to start thinking about your Thanksgiving meal and how to make it as sustainable as possible. The most effective thing to do is to focus on providing foods that are in season, local and organic.

You've already heard me blathering on (and on) about the reasons for eating locally, but here's a reminder: On average, for each plate of food obtained locally, 2.2 pounds of CO₂ emissions are prevented. (This is from a University of WA study, so I'm not sure how it extrapolates out to other areas of the country.)

So, in another effort to encourage you to do more, you can pledge to Eat Local for Thanksgiving by adding a comment to this post. In your pledge you can state what you are planning to do, whether that be acquiring a local turkey to getting all your vegetables at a farmer's market, etc. It's totally up to you. The point is to think about where each food source comes from and buy it locally or don't serve it if it's out of season or has to travel miles to get to your plate.

Now, we all have our family favorites, and I'm sure Aunt Agnes might be upset when she doesn't see her favorite green bean casserole because the season is over in your neck of the woods and you neglected to can or freeze any. So, for those of you who want to take the opportunity during your Thanksgiving meal to discuss the issues surrounding food and where it comes from, the Puget Sound Fresh website has some printable discussion cards for your Thanksgiving table that may help you explain why certain things are missing.

Between now and Thanksgiving, I'll keep a running counter in the sidebar for the amount of CO₂ emissions prevented based on the number of people pledging to eat local.*

What are we doing? Well, we are getting a local, pasture ranged heritage turkey from Thundering Hooves that we ordered way back in July. In addition, I'm sure we'll be serving all sorts of local potatoes, greens and apple pie, plus pumpkin pie from my pumpkins.

How are you choosing local for Thanksgiving this year?

*This won't be extremely scientific, but I'll just assume one plate worth of savings for each pledge, unless you specify otherwise. In other words, if you know you'll be serving all local food to 10 people, I'll count that as 10 plates worth.

Add local foods, save some miles

Many of you have pledged to eat local this Thanksgiving, with approximately 116 plates worth of food coming from local sources rather than shipped in products from afar.

An estimated 255 pounds of CO₂ has been saved just from these pledges alone. Just to put that in perspective, this is the equivalent of driving 313 less miles in your car.

Although that may not seem like a lot, if the 15,000 unique visitors that visited my blog in the last month replaced one plate worth of food at their Thanksgiving table with local products, that would be like taking the average vehicle off the road for 40,500 miles. I think that's a number that really makes a difference. A huge difference that just you Crunchy Chickens out there can make without much effort or extra cost.

So, even though many of you may not have pledged to do so, it's not too late to add local produce to your table.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Planning my Thanksgiving attack

We'll see if I have the time and/or energy to do all of this, but since we'll have so many relatives in the house helping manage the kids, this may actually be the easiest year ever.

Here's the menu, including how I'm making it local:

Herb Butter Roasted Turkey and Gravy - using the organic turkey I won and herbs from the backyard

Parmesan Mashed Potatoes - made with local dairy

Roasted Glazed Orange Carrots - using the orange marmalade I canned over the summer

Plum Port Cranberry Sauce - made with the organic Plum Port preserves I canned over the summer and local cranberries

Pumpkin-Praline Pie - using the pumpkins I grew in my backyard (I already made the puree a while ago)

Apple Pie - made using the apple pie filling I made and froze from the apples from my friend's orchard in Central Washington and served with local ice cream

I'll also be serving bread made from a local bakery, local wine and possibly a few other things if I get around to it.

I wanted to use local potatoes and carrots, but the stores I went to didn't carry them and I didn't have time to go to a farmer's market. Sigh.

Turka-lurkey

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and I'm sure we're all starting our plans for dinner. If you are not hosting, it's a different story, but for the rest of us, it's a lot of planning, enjoyment and work.

Although I wasn't able to acquire a local turkey (there aren't enough processing facilities in Washington state to support many local turkeys), I did win a free turkey from the grocery store I shop at most. I was able to get a $40 organic turkey (frozen, alas) for free from Organic Prairie. Since they are part of a coop, it's possible it's local, but I doubt it.

Eat Local for Thanksgiving

It's not too late to start thinking about your Thanksgiving meal and how to make it as sustainable as possible. The most effective thing to do is to focus on providing foods that are in season, local and organic.

You've already heard me blathering on (and on) about the reasons for eating locally, but here's a reminder: On average, for each plate of food obtained locally, 2.2 pounds of CO₂ emissions are prevented. (This is from a University of WA study, so I'm not sure how it extrapolates out to other areas of the country.)

So, in another effort to encourage you to do more, you can pledge to Eat Local for Thanksgiving by adding a comment to this post. In your pledge you can state what you are planning to do, whether that be acquiring a local turkey to getting all your vegetables at a farmer's market, etc. It's totally up to you. The point is to think about where each food source comes from and buy it locally or don't serve it if it's out of season or has to travel miles to get to your plate.

Now, we all have our family favorites, and I'm sure Aunt Agnes might be upset when she doesn't see her favorite green bean casserole because the season is over in your neck of the woods and you neglected to can or freeze any. So, for those of you who want to take the opportunity during your Thanksgiving meal to discuss the issues surrounding food and where it comes from, the Puget Sound Fresh website has some printable discussion cards for your Thanksgiving table that may help you explain why certain things are missing.

Between now and Thanksgiving, I'll keep a running counter in the sidebar for the amount of CO₂ emissions prevented based on the number of people pledging to eat local.*

Now go forth and choose local for Thanksgiving!

*This won't be extremely scientific, but I'll just assume one plate worth of savings for each pledge, unless you specify otherwise. In other words, if you know you'll be serving all local food to 10 people, I'll count that as 10 plates worth.