Coffee heat rising

Bounty!

The other day Costco was selling fresh turkeys for 89 cents a pound. Turkeys with no weird chemicals injected into them! Personally, I deeply dislike “Butterball” turkeys, which have been infused with fluids deemed to taste “buttery” and to keep the bloated bird nice and juicy while it spends untold hours in your oven as you try to cook 20 pounds of meat. Flavorless is bad enough; fake flavor surpasses bad enough.

Anyway, no weird gunk in them and under a buck a pound! Hallelujuah: just what Cassie the Corgi needs to feed her for the next three months!

So I grabbed a 20-pounder, and Thursday it went into the oven to roast slowly, unstuffed, at 325 degrees, for five hours. After La Maya and I returned from an outing, I hauled it out. Beat back the pup, who was driven mad by the aroma and a larger pile of food than he ever thought could possibly exist in one place. Because onions are poisonous to dogs, I’d cut up a big onion (also purchased at Costco for considerably less than the buck apiece Safeway is now charging) and put it under the bird, which I set on a rack over a roasting pan. Planned to  make an onion-flavored gravy to pour over whatever part of the meat I chose to eat myself, hoping to make it taste like something.

Unlike last year’s fiasco, this turkey did not exude something over a quart of water. The pan contained mostly actual pan drippings, which cooked into a nice gravy when some wine and flour were added.

The meat…meh! It came out of the oven moist and nicely cooked. It didn’t taste as bad as last year’s turkey dog-meat experiment, but it still had some of that unpleasant chemically flavor that seems to permeate all modern turkeys. Guess that’s just what you get from factory-farmed birds.

Anyway, it’ll do to feed the dog, and since I can no longer afford beef, I’ll have to eat some of it, too, like it or not.

And what an enormous amount of meat! Two plates laden with it, plus a gigantic carcass with which to make enough turkey stock to last a year.

We ended up with enough turkey to fill six large Ziplock bags and two plastic refrigerator containers. This will last Cassie for a long time. It definitely will carry her through the holidays, when I invariably run out of dog meat the evening before Christmas or New Year’s. Supplemented with an occasional purchase of chicken or pork, which can still sometimes be found at an affordable price, it should keep the little dog in business for quite a while.

 

 

4 thoughts on “Bounty!”

  1. Like you I buy a large chicken(on sale) with the dog and cat in mind and make sir fry etc with the good bits and soup with the not so good bits. I’m not over keen on Turkey so I usually avoid buying it. I identify with you and the red meat but a little of what you fancy goes a long way!

  2. @ Sam: Eat the stuff! It makes wonderful soup. Add veggies, rice or barley, cooked chicken or meat if you eat it, egg if you eat it, maybe a splash of wine or sherry. It is incredibly good.

    Use it to braise pork chops or chicken. Use it in place of water to cook rice.

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