We were lucky enough this year to get an up close and personal look at our Thanksgiving Turkey. We are going to try and make this post as friendly and kosher as possible, but be warned: Turkeys are actually birds, and they have to be killed in order for us to eat them on Thanksgiving.
Whew! Now that that's over!
We were talking on Monday about how cool it is that having a varied group of friends allows us so many different and interesting opportunities. Zach Miller, who Nate attended Tandem Friends with, and his beautiful wife Sarah have started an organic farm outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Tiber Creek Organics (TCO) is on something like 300 acres, with picturesque flowing hills.
We arrived early, but of course the farm was already buzzing and Zach was disinfecting all the equipment. Our first task was to go get the turkeys from their pen. TCO had some trouble ordering their baby turkeys this year, and as a result about 8 of their 30 turkeys would stay around for Christmas instead, and we had to pick the 22 largest ones to be Thanksgiving turkeys. This was the only part of the day where we found that we had a little mental hesitation; choosing the birds that would go actually felt more uncomfortable than anything else we did that day.
After they were caught and boxed (catching a turkey is similar to catching a chicken, there's just more bird to deal with), we took them back to the top of the hill. The structure where the processing takes place is open on all four sides, like a permanent tent on a concrete block. There were five stations: the cones, the bath, the feather-fingers, gutting and quality control. We all started off by disinfecting our arms and basically "scrubbing in". Killing an animal isn't clean, but we did our best to not introduce anything else into the process.
Carlos was the only one who actually physically killed a turkey, apparently the cuts that need to be made are very precise. Nate worked taking them for the cones once they had drained, bathing them in scalding hot water, and putting them in the fingers. The scalding water loosened the feathers and the defeathering machine worked by spinning the turkey around a large basin lined with rubber fingers. Meanwhile Justine was on quality control pulling out extra feathers with pliers and fingernails and just generally checking the turkeys for anything that would be weird to munch on.
After a while, quality control was much slower and birds were stacking up so we both ended up running QA. Once done there, we joined Zach, Leroy and Carlos taking apart gullets, which are thick muscled stomach bags that have this leathery inside that you have to peel away from the rest. Very difficult! Think trying to remove an old bumper sticker. After that, everything went into the ice baths and needed to sit for a while.
We headed into town to say hello to Mom and have lunch. Nate had his usual turkey sandwich at Bodo's, which we decided meant that this experience didn't affect our food choice too much. We returned to the farm to pack and bag the turkeys; neck, gullet, heart, liver, put it in the bag and seal, put it in the bag and seal. Then we bought our turkey and we were off!
Two days later, we re-explored our turkey on the morning of Thanksgiving. Nate and I have never been the ones to cook the turkey before, so this was also an entirely new experience also. We rubbed, spiced, stuffed and put it in the oven. Then, not wanting to waste anything, we looked for uses for the extras. We ended up using the extra parts to make turkey stock for the stuffing, and then Nate reduced and reduced and spiced and reduced, and magically we had gravy!
We are thankful for so many things this holiday season. Thankful to have friends who are doing great things for the world, with so much passion that we can share. We are thankful for all of the people that we love; the family that we got to spend Thanksgiving with and also the family that we missed. We were also lucky enough to take part in a Generation X Thanksgiving just this past weekend with Adam, Lauren and many friends and co-workers. We are so lucky to have all of you!
Here's to another year to be thankful for!
-Justine and Nate
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