You have a plan for Thanksgiving? Eating in immoderation, I hope? Preferably with friends or at least relatives who don’t make you too crazy?
M’hijito and I are going, once again, to the home of his delightful friends, the couple with the twins. 🙂 Better them than me, eh? Seriously, the children are outrageously adorable and really very well behaved. Uhm…at least, they were at the stage they were in the last time we saw them. LOL!
Every year this couple throws a gigantic TG shindig, to which they invite ALL the friends and relatives. This provides an opportunity to trot the old folks around, which is entertaining. Lots of good food and booze are served, children play, dogs oversee, old folks gossip, young adults work their buns off. What could be better? Assuming you’re an old folk or a small child, that is.
I really enjoy my son’s friends. It’s always a delight to have the opportunity to see them in action and talk with them. Wish there were more such opportunities.
Every Thanksgiving, too, I avail myself of the cheap prices on bad turkey, so as to get meat for the dogs, enough to feed them for a month or more. Right now a Butterball is in the oven; it should be ready in another three hours.
At 79 cents a pound, these things are really no bargain. They’re injected with sodium-laced water, so, according to the package, 8% of what you’re paying for is water.
Hm. So this turkey is 11.59 pounds. That means I actually got 10.66 pounds of meat and bone for my $9.15. Sooo…if you divide $9.15 by 10.66 pounds, that should give you the real price per pound, right? $9.15/10.66 = $1.50 a pound. Cripes!
When you consider that maybe half the thing is bones, I could’ve done better buying a boneless pork roast at Costco, and probably gotten better quality meat for the hounds. A LOT better….
Add to that the fact that the agricorp that produces Butterball turkeys generated the first-ever conviction for felony animal abuse for its atrocious treatment of its captive birds, and you’re given even more pause.
Because of Ruby’s allergies, which lead to ear infections, the vet asked me to quit feeding her both beef and pork. She hasn’t had either in weeks, and her big old rabbity ears have pretty well cleared up.
That may have to do with the fact that she stole and ATE the whole tube of ear ointment… Does Otomax work internally? Argh.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the problem is beef — the quiescent infection flared up when I gave her a rawhide chew toy, which is, of course, a beef product. But still feeling leery, I decided to hold the pork until such time as my health is good enough to allow for wrestling with the dog over her ears again. It’s no fun to treat this dog with ear wash and ointments!
So that’s why I bought a substandard turkey and stuck it in the oven.
Oh well. I hope this one doesn’t taste like factory chemicals, the way the last icky Butterball turkey I bought did. That one, I wouldn’t even feed to the dogs. I’m hoping to get a meal or two for myself, despite the low quality; then cut up the rest for the dogs and use the bones to make broth, which can be frozen for future use.
Speaking of turkey, if you imbibe do check out Revanche’s recipe for turkey meatloaf.
And so, to work…
Happy Thanksgiving, One and All
I remember when Butterball turkeys were the high end turkey to buy. Long time ago. Haven’t had one in a few years in favor of local farm raised. We paid $1.99 per pound for our 12 lb Turkey this year. Hope it’s worth it!
Enjoy your day, sounds like fun. We’ll have our daughter, her boyfriend and a friend at our table this year. Happy Thanksgiving!
Yeah, my mother always looked for Butterball. People were less sensitive about artificial stuff being pumped into the food…as I recall, didn’t they pump artificial butter into it in those days? Margarine or something? I may be imagining that. But 8% water is not acceptable, in my opinion.
We started buying Young’s Farm turkeys, till the farm was bought by a developer who started sprouting structures. Don’t know if there’s any local turkey here anymore, but you can buy any manner of free-range, cold-processed, no-added-chemicals poultry at Whole Foods and Sprouts these days. Personally, I’d rather have a rack of lamb or a nice standing rib roast, tho’.
Hmmmm….My math comes up with 86 cents a pound for your turkey….$1.50??? My turkey was free from the grocery store and we’ll be feeding a small contingent of Family. Sorry you don’t care for the turkey…..we love it. We have a 20 pounder and it will provide a nice meal for us and PLENTY of leftovers. And for the life of me I don’t know how turkey farmers do it. My turkey would have been about $20 had I purchased it. And to be clear, I wouldn’t pet a turkey for $20 let alone raise one, slaughter it, process it, flash freeze it, and ship it to a store to be purchased….all for a retail price of $20. Quite the bargain from where I sit….
Ah hah! I hope you’re right…English-major math can do wondrous things! 😀 If your figures are correct, that would be a lot less frustrating, since not all that much meat actually came off this bird. When I weighed the meat to make up the dog food, it only came to about seven pounds. That’s a lot of bone and water weight!
This particular turkey turned out to taste mildly OK. Overall, I find modern American turkeys flavorless. Turkey is supposed to have a distinctive FLAVOR, not be bland pap. When I was a little girl, turkey tasted wonderful, and even today, turkey purchased and raised in England or Europe can be delightful.
I ate part of it, cut off and processed the meat, and turned the carcass into stock. The stock’s a little watery — it needs to be boiled down by about 50%, which I’ll do another day.
The only annoyance was that instead of the whole liver I got two little lobes. I needed the liver to saute and put into the pan-cooked dressing we’re taking to the shindig today. Fortunately my son brought some sausage, though — that will have to do the job. They did manage to include the neck (sometimes they leave that out, too). Cooked that along with some onion & garlic in the liquid that seeped out of the meat and a bit of wine. That made a very tasty stock that will be tossed into the bread to make the dressing.
I don’t know WHAT was wrong with the last Butterball I purchased! The “water” they pumped into it must have been contaminated with something, because the meat had a distinct, unpleasant chemical flavor. It really was inedible — it all ended up in the garbage. Mercifully, I’d bought it for the dogs. If I’d planned to serve up that bird to friends and relatives for a Thanksgiving dinner, I would really have been in a pickle!
It’s true they sell the things very cheaply. I don’t understand how they make a profit.
The birds are hideously abused. Even if they weren’t treated brutally, the conditions in which they’re born and raised are inhumane. Really, when you look at that video and read some of the other reports, you think “I shouldn’t even be buying this to feed to the dogs.” It probably is immoral to buy them at all.
BTW, here’s a blogger who found she got 8 pounds of meat off a 21.67-pound turkey: http://dollydomestic.com/188/how-much-meat-does-a-turkey-yield/
Even at 49 cents a pound (what she paid), the ONLY way this can be regarded as a bargain is if you use the carcass to make stock. But even then…come ON! How much does it cost to buy a box of chicken stock on sale???
Hmmm….Our 20 pounder had a pretty good “yield”…better than the 7 pounds noted above. Fed 6 adults including “seconds”. After dinner DW picked about 3 gallon freezer bags full of meat. As is the tradition she left the bones in the roaster pan with some of the meat and the juices. She will use this to make turkey soup….a lot of turkey soup. This soup will provide countless meals and we freeze the rest to be used later. We’ll be enjoying this turkey for quite a while.
Eeek! You don’t use the drippings to make brown gravy??? But that’s the BEST PART of a turkey dinner! 😀
Happy Thanksgiving! And it’s good to hear that you have a solid plan in place for the boob issue, too.
I’m spending the day with my mother, sister, niece and nephew. I get to spend a lot of time in the car with my mom since I’m picking her up and driving her into the city to sister’s house. I’m not grumbling about it, though, since I’m not sure when I’ll get to spend a chunk of time with her again. Since I am technically a homeless vagabond right now, I also get to bring something very easy to the dinner: pop-open containers of crescent rolls to toss in the oven when I get there. 🙂
Tomorrow morning I hit the road with the dog and sister to drive out west to my new home and new life. Here’s hoping the weather reports are accurate and there will be no major storms along the way!
Westerly, eh? Well, plan to pack your jacket in mothballs if decide to come through Arizona. It’s supposed to be 80 degrees here today. Weather has been stunningly gorgeous. As usual, we’ll be cooking the meat outdoors.
Best wishes for a bright future in your new digs!