Accidental Soup: Turkey & Wild Rice

Sometimes the process of making soup is totally opportunistic. But that is as it should be: soup is the poor man's way of letting nothing go to waste.

In this case, the stock was gleaned from the carcasses of two roasted turkey breasts, scavenged from a recent catering job. I made the stock in my usual fashion--chopping the carcasses into pieces and adding onion, carrot, celery, parsley and bay leaf. A reader recently suggested using leeks in this stock instead of the more common onion. But I can only say we are planning to eat the soup, not make love to it, so why flatter it with such precious baubles as leeks?

In any case, I had been planning to make a soup eventually with this stock using some sort of small pasta from the grocery. But then while rummaging around the pantry I came across a fairly large quantity of wild rice previously purchased in bulk. I cooked some of that in turkey stock until it was puffed out and bursting with flavor. And it occurred to me: why buy pasta, when I had a big pot of wild rice? I went out to the garden and harvested some carrots and some parsnips that have been resting very comfortably in the soil and gaining sweetness in the recent cold weather. And so this soup was born.

Simply saute with extra-virgin olive oil in a big, heavy pot a half a small onion, a couple of carrots and a couple of parsnips, all cut into small dice and seasoned with a teaspoon of coarse salt to bring out the juices. When the onion is soft, add about 8 cups turkey stock, then about 2 cups turkey meat (saved from our heritage Thanksgiving bird) cut into medium dice and 1 1/2 cups (or so) cooked wild rice. Over moderate heat, bring everything up to steaming. Season as needed with salt and freshly ground black pepper and serve in warm bowls with thick slices of a rustic bread. You can garnish the soup with chopped parsley or cilantro, as you like.

I do believe this is one of the most satisfying and flavorful soups I have ever tasted.

Turkey Stock

You didn't throw that turkey carcass in the trash. Did you?

I hope not, because now would be the time to be making some excellent turkey stock.

I don't spend too much time agonizing over this. One thing I think is especially important is to break up the turkey bones. I take them outside with a big cleaver and a hammer and crack them in two. Break up the rib cage, breast bone, etc., even more.

Throw all the bones in a big stock pot with a couple of large carrots cut into pieces, an onion sliced in half (skin on), two or three stalks of celery cut into pieces, a fist-full of parsley sprigs, a couple of bay leaves and a few peppercorns. Cover everything with a couple gallons of water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a gentle simmer and cook for a few hours, or until the stock is quite aromatic and any meat left on the turkey bones is falling off.

Use the stock to make a delicious soup and freeze rest for later.

A Heritage Thanksgiving

The first year I helped our farmer friend Mike slaughter his turkeys I came home with a 40-pound bird as my reward. It barely fit in our oven and my wife has been on a tear ever since trying to reduce the size of our Thanksgiving gobbler.


This year, we implored Mike to find us a smaller bird and he replied that he could get us something closer to 12 or 14 pounds from a friend who was raising heritage breeds. But it would cost us an extra dollar a pound, he warned. We jumped at the chance.


So our turkey this year was a 12.4-pound bronze turkey. You'll notice that these heritage birds are slightly darker, the legs a little longer, the breasts a little slimmer. I liked the look of it and cooked it in the usual manner:


About four hours before the bird is supposed to go in the oven, clean it up and salt the cavity and the outside with coarse salt. Let it sit on the kitchen counter and come up to room temperature. Just before placing it in a 450-degree oven, brush it all over with extra-virgin olive oil and stuff the cavity with onion, garlic, carrots, celery, parsley and thyme. Tie the legs together but otherwise leave the cavity open.


Place the bird on a rack inside a big roasting pan along with a handful of fresh sage and a hand full of rosemary sprigs. Place the bird in the oven for 1/2 hour to brown in the high heat. Then lower the heat to 350, remove bird and flip it over in the rack. Place it back in the oven and roast another 1/2 hour, then flip it again. Continue this process for two hours. The turkey may well be done (if you have a very heavy bird, this could take up to 3 1/2 hours. But I have never had a turkey take longer than 3 1/2 hours to roast using this method.)


To test for doneness, stick an instant-read thermometer deep into the thickest part of the thigh or the wing joint, being careful to stay away from the bone. I had to use the wing joint because the thigh on the heritage turkey wasn't thick enough. It's done when it reaches 160, or a few degrees less. Place the turkey in its rack on the kitchen counter to "coast" while you make your gravy.


For the gravy, I will have been simmering all morning the turkey neck and the gizzards (except liver) in a pot with water and the usual aromatics--onion, celery, carrot, parsley, thyme. I eat the neck with a little salt. Then I put the roasting pan on the stove top and turn the heat up to moderately high. I brown the bits at the bottom of the pan (there's much less juice and fat with a heritage turkey), then pour a couple of ladles of the giblet broth, stir everything around. Turn off the heat.



Now melt about six tablespoons butter (or turkey fat) in a large sauce pan, add six tablespoons flour and make a roux, stirring frequently over moderate heat. The flour needs to cook for just a few minutes. Now you can pour in the browning juices from the roasting pan, whisking as the gravy quickly thickens, and adding giblet broth, one ladle-full at a time, whisking and whisking, until the gravy is just the thickness you like. Remember it will get even thicker after you've taken it off the stove, so I usually shoot for something a little thinner than what I would put on the table.


Finish the gravy with a splash of heavy cream, maybe some Madeira. I didn't have Madeira this year and my wife suggested I use Calvados, the French apple brandy, instead, since we were having apple tarte Tatin for dessert. That worked just fine. Season with salt and pepper to taste.


There were 13 of us for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's new digs in McLean Virginia, including my in-laws and sister-in-law from California with her friend from India. Everyone swooned over the turkey. The heritage bird was by far the moistest, most flavorful thing we had ever tasted. It didn't need any of that brining or deep-fat frying that the food sections and magazines are all out of breath over this time of year.


Say goodbye to the Butterball. I do believe you could cook a heritage turkey almost any old way and it would still be the most delicious thing you've ever experienced.

We're In Martha Stewart Living

This month I play a small role in the never-ending effort to "solve" Thanksgiving. In Magazine Land, that would entail the issue of how to prepare a turkey correctly sized for your particular gathering.

I have to admit, this assignment almost stumped me. Of course, Martha had already done all the heavy lifting, coming up with three different turkey recipes alligned with three very different sized gatherings.

There's a dry-brined whole turkey for 14, for instance, then a wee turkey breast roasted with root vegetables to serve six. By far the most elaborate preparation is a boneless turkey breast stuffed with pecans and sausage, rolled in the manner of a French roulade and roasted in cheese cloth. All you have to do is find a butcher to sell you a boneless breast. Oh, right. A butcher.

You'll notice that two of these Thanksgiving solutions involve turkey white meat. Unless its stuffed between two slices of bread with mayo and cranberry sauce, or smothered in gravy or Bechamel sauce, I don't even really like white meat. If you like to spend idle hours drooling over gorgeous food photos, though, this piece is for you.

Otherwise, my best advice for Thanksgiving is to find a local farmer who will sell you a pasture-raised turkey of almost any kind. Cook it any way you like. You are almost guaranteed to have the best turkey you ever tasted.

We're In Edible Chesapeake!

On the right-hand side of this page, you'll see a picture of a man in a strange plastic suit using a machine to pluck a turkey. That's our farmer friend Mike Klein. I've lost count of how many times I've visited his small truck farm in Brandywine, Maryland, shortly before Thanksgiving to help him round up and butcher his flock of turkeys.

My first year as a volunteer, Mike had around 80 turkeys and he'd ordered the chicks especially early in the season. That gave the birds a few extra weeks to grow. My reward for helping that weekend was a 42-pound bird that just barely fit into our oven and earned me a permanent Thanksgiving black mark where my spouse is concerned.

Butchering turkeys puts you in close contact with the food destined for your table. We chase them down inside their pen, then hang them up and slit their throats so they can bleed out. They get a brief dunk in scalding water, then a turn on the plucking machine before we gut them, chill them down and package them for transport to Mike's customer's.

I wrote up the experience for this fall issue of Edible Chesapeake magazine, now on news stands. Next to my piece is one by editor Renee Catacalos about taste-testing heritage turkey breeds. Unlike Renee, apparently, I like gamey flavors. That 42-pound bird--a broad-breasted bronze--was one of the best I've ever eaten.

People have come up with all kinds of ingenious methods for cooking turkeys and testing for doneness. But here's a curious factoid: no matter what size the bird (unstuffed), they all take 3 1/2 hours to cook. I'm not sure why that is, but that's my experience. Maybe it's because our turkeys are always bigger than 20 pounds. Just another of those kitchen mysteries we'll probably never solve.

Breakfast

Turkey tetrazzini, reheated in the microwave.

Preparation time: 3 minutes

Shopping: None

But wait! you say. Isn't that the same turkey tetrazzini I made a week ago from our locally-grown, self-butchered, Thanksgiving turkey?

Right you are. And the noodles were handmade too, by my daughter and I. There was a whole pan of it. My wife and I had it for dinner once. The daughter refused (she was really disappointed that we added the turkey and onions and peas and stuff to perfectly fine noodles that would have been delicious just plain--in fact, she had us wash some in the sink.)

Well, the only person around here who likes to eat the same thing more than one day in a row is me. So turkey tetrazzini has been my breakfast for the last week. I don't mind. If it's delicious on day one, it's delicious on days two, three and four, far as I'm concerned. I do the same thing with stews, soups, rice dishes, cooked greens, pizza, you name it.

Any of you others out there belong to this category of secret repeat eater?

Dark Days: Turkey Tetrazzini

I am embarrassed to say how long this meal has been in the planning. But our leftover turkey from Thanksgiving has bounced from the fridge to the freezer and back again. Our CSA (local farm) delivery has been on haitus and I did not want to make the noodles for the tetrazzini without our local eggs.

Do I sound desperate, or what?

What it is, I think, is just guilt over the fact that I have not been able to source all of the ingredients for our food locally. Call it lack of preparation, lack of spunk, or just a beginner's floundering around. The turkey in this dish is the dark meat from the last drumstick and wing that I have been so carefully hoarding. The pasta is made with local eggs but King Arthur flour. The salad is from our garden, dressed with a honey-mustard vinaigrette from standard pantry items. (I'd even been saving the salad greens for this occasion--the weather has been so fluky, I wasn't sure we'd have any left in the garden to pick otherwise.)

Yesterday our CSA deliveries finally resumed. So when I arrived home from teaching my "food appreciation" classes in the evening, my daughter and I set to work making the pasta. It's a two-egg affair with a 50/50 mix of all-purpose flour and white whole wheat flour. I gave the dough a quick knead on the countertop, then fed it into our pasta machine while my daughter cranked. Turns out we make a great pasta making team and it's so easy, I wonder sometimes why we bother buying prepared pasta. We rolled the dough up to the next-to-last setting, resulting in a sturdy noodle once it was cut into linguine.

The golden, almost orange hue of the pastured egg yolks give the pasta a rich depth of color, while the addition of whole wheat flour produces a very satisfying chew.

The pasta is cooked in a big pot of salted water just to the al dente stage, then quickly drained and rinsed in cold water to arrest the cooking. Meanwhile, we sauteed onion and mushrooms and mixed these with frozen peas in a veloute sauce--a roux of butter and flour blended as for a gravy with homemade turkey stock and finished with a bit of heavy cream.

Layer the pasta and sauce in a greased casserole (a small square, in this case), dust with bread crumbs and bake in a 375-degree oven until the bread crumbs are golden brown and the sauce is bubbling. Scoop onto plates with the salad and serve.

(Note: for an even richer Tetrazzini sauce, try adding a tempered egg yolk and some Marsala wine.)

Turkey Hash

You thought we were done with turkey?

We are coming to the end. But it turns out a 31-pound bird such as the one we butchered and served for Thanksgiving produces lots of meat, enough for several meals. I had frozen one of the wings and a drumstick together and recently defrosted them and spent a leisurely half-hour at the kitchen table picking off all the tender morsels.

The result is this hash, which started with some diced onion and a number of the crudite vegetables we displayed at a cocktail party last night, especially the baby purple potatoes and Brussels sprouts. After sauteeing the onion, I tossed in the other vegetables, cut into small pieces, and tossed over high heat with extra-virgin olive oil to achieve a little browning. Finally, I added the turkey, seasoned with salt and pepper and finished with some chopped parsley out of the garden.

To top it off, I poached an egg--a very fresh farm egg is best--and garnished with some grated Parmesan. This would make a fine meal anytime, breakfast lunch or dinner.

Turkey Mash

The last few days have been a race against time to get a houseful of leftovers into a form that can be easily eaten or easily stored away in the freezer.

In case you haven't noticed, we hate to waste food.

At the top of the list has been the remains of that 31-pound pastured turkey we cooked for Thanksgiving. A goodly portion of it went into the freezer last month, but I removed it to make room for all the soups I've been making lately. So there I had a freezer bag full of breast meat, and in the crisper drawer a second bag full of cooked fingerling potatoes.

Hence, turkey a la king over mashed potatoes--leftovers squared.

The way I make a big batch of turkey a la king is thus: In a large cast-iron skillet, saute about four cups sliced cremini mushrooms. They'll need plenty of extra-virgin olive oil and about a teaspoon of salt for seasoning. When those are done, saute a yellow onion cut into medium dice. Again, season with salt to draw the juices out and cook until the onions are just soft, about 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, put four tablespoons butter in a heavy pot to melt over moderate heat, then add four tablespoons flour, stir to make a roux and cook about five minutes. Do not brown. Since I had so much turkey stock made already, I heated three cups of that and when the roux was ready began pouring the stock into the roux--about a cup at a time--bringing it to a boil to thicken. When the stock has been incorporated and thickened, add about 1/2 cup heavy cream. The sauce should easily coat a spoon, not too thick. Season with salt and white pepper.

(For a richer sauce, you can also add an egg yolk. First temper the yolk with some of the sauce (stirring a few spoonfuls of hot sauce with the yolk in a small bowl), then add the yolk and cook another minute or two.)

Cut the turkey meat into bite-size pieces and add that plus the sauteed mushrooms and onions to the sauce. Add 1 cup frozen peas and for a final flourish, stir in 1 tablespoon Madeira or Marsala wine.

Traditionally, turkey a la king is served over puff pastry. But we aren't so fussy. Leftover potatoes seem like a perfect match to me. They can be reheated in the microwave and mashed roughly right on the plate. Or perhaps you already have some mashed potatoes poised for some action in the fridge. Simply ladle the finished turkey a la king over the potatoes, garnish with some chopped parsley and serve hot.

To me, this seems like a perfectly fine way to heat up the kitchen on a cold winter's night.

Turkey-Rice Soup with Garden Vegetables

I get an almost sinister sort of satisfaction pulling carrots from my garden four days before Christmas. Most of the farmers markets are closed. The community gardens are in a deep slumber. Yet I am still harvesting.

Okay, that doesn't make me a genius--maybe just late. My carrot bed, of course, is getting smaller and smaller. I was late planting my rutabagas and turnips, but they seem to be getting bigger despite overnight termperatures below freezing. And I still have beets, potatoes and lots of Swiss chard. Until the first really deep freeze, that is.

The reason I am pulling carrots is for a turkey soup. I still have a couple of pounds of turkey meat from Thanksgiving, recently removed from the freezer and thawed. This also is a good time to clean out the crisper drawer, where I keep partially used onions, half a bunch of celery, etc. I also have a stray bag of Basmati brown rice staring down at me from the pantry.

And in the cold room are two 8-cup containers of brown turkey stock, the result of recently roasting bone-in turkey breasts on a bed of onion, carrot, celery, garlic, thyme. The basic architecture of a soup is beginning to take shape.

Isn't that the original point of making soup, to use all the leftovers in the kitchen?

In one pot I am cooking 1 cup Basmati brown rice with 2 cups brown turkey stock. In another large, heavy Dutch oven I am sauteeing 1/2 red onion and 1/2 yellow onion, diced medium, about 4 celery stalks, peeled and cut on the diagonal, and 3 carrots, peeled and diced medium. I dumped all this into the pot after heating about 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil. Salt the vegetables liberally (about 1 teaspoon coarse salt) to draw out the juices. Simmer until the onions are soft, about 8 minutes.

Add 8 cups stock to the vegetables, bring up the heat and cook just a few minutes, or until all of the vegetables are tender to your liking. When the rice has finished cooking (when all the stock is absorbed, or add a little more stock if it runs dry), add that to the soup pot as well. Finally, add about 3 cups turkey meat (white and dark would be nice) cut into bite-size pieces.

If the soup is too thick, just add some more stock and adjust the seasonings.

We will have some of this soup for dinner. It would be delicious with sweet potato biscuits. I'll also freeze some for later and to put in client lunches.

Lunch = Leftovers

Turkey breast in whole-wheat pita pocket, sage-infused mayo, cranberry relish, arugula from the CSA box.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

Dark Days: Meal 6

Turkey left over from the 31-pound Thanksgiving bird we butchered at our friend Mike Klein's farm in nearby Prince George's County. Here some dark meat is piled on a thick slice of yeasted sweet-potato bread (using sweet potatoes from our CSA package), smeared with mayo and gingered cranberry relish. Everything is then smothered with giblet gravy. In the background is a simple salad composed of the many lettuce varieties, arugula, mizuna and baby mustard greens we have growing in the garden.


The sweet potato bread is from Bill Neal's classic Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie.

To make two loaves in standard loaf pans (9 x 5 x 3 inches):

2 pkg. dry yeast

1/2 cup warm water

1 cup milk

1/4 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup butter

1 1/2 cup mashed, cooked, cold sweet potatoes

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup rolled, uncooked oats

Dissolve dry yeast in warm water.

Heat milk with sugar and salt, stirring until dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Cream butter and sweet potatoes well. Add dissolved yeast, milk mixture and then all dry ingredients. Beat very well, then turn out onto a floured surface. Knead vigorously until satiny, about 10 minutes.

Place dough in a bowl, cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 hour. Punch down and divide into two portions. Roll into loaf shapes and place in greased loaf pans. Cover and allow to rise about 1 hour or until doubled.

Before baking, glaze the loaves with 1 egg beaten with 2 tablespoons milk. Place loaves in a 400-degree oven and bake 45 minutes. They should emerge a deep honey color.

Note: These loaves can also be braided before placing in the loaf pans.

Turkey Stock

In our house it was customary the day after Thanksgiving to divide the carcass and start a huge pot of turkey stock. The house would fill with the unmistakable aroma of turkey on the stove, a signal to one and all that we would soon be embarking on a week-long mission to consume as much turkey soup and leftover turkey as possible. Thus did we give proof to the adage that when something is in season, you eat it until it's gone.


It seems axiomatic that when the Thanksgiving feast is over, something of a turkey penury begins. My wife, for instance, loves the holiday--loves all the preparations and the family gathering and the protocols of the meal--but hates leftover turkey. I can remember an infinite number of turkey sandwiches--is there anything more delectable than the combintation of turkey, mayo and cranberry sauce?--as well as the slogging through of the first turkey-a-la-king, followed by the seemingly interminable nights of leftover turkey-a-la-king.


Personally, I love turkey sandwiches and turkey-a-la-king, preferably with cremini mushrooms. And for all those cooks who dread the onslaught of leftovers, there is this thought: freeze it.


We will not have nearly so many leftovers as a 31-pound bird might produce, because everyone who joined us for Thanksgiving dinner had a package of leftovers thrust at them before they could exit the house. Still, the carcass I saved in the cooler is a pretty large one and will make a generous quantity of stock.


Use this for turkey soup, of course, but also to enhance that turkey-a-la-king sauce, to put some spark into a turkey chili, perhaps, and for soups with beans and hearty greens. Perhaps you have some favorite uses for turkey stock? By all means, send them along.


The process is almost identical as for a chicken stock. The main point is to break up the bones to extract as much flavor and collagen as possible. A good stock should be quite gelatinous once it is refrigerated. I use a heavy cleaver to crack the carcass into numerous pieces. In fact, I need two pots for this operation.


At the bottom of a large pot, place an onion sliced in half, two carrots broken into pieces, two celery stalks broken into pieces, a fistfull of leafy parsley stems, several sprigs of thyme, two bay leaves and a dozen pepper corns. Cover these with pieces of the carcase, leg bones, wing bones, etc. Cover with cool water and place a heavy object on top to hold everything down. I use a stainless, collapsible steaming basket, but a ceramic plate also works to hold all of the solid contents under the surface of the water while it cooks.



Bring the liquid almost to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer where bubbles are occasionally breaking the surface. You do want to cook the stock, but boiling and roiling will make the stock cloudy. Continue cooking for three hours or more, until the stock is quite flavorful. Remove the pot from the heat.



Allow the stock to cool a bit and collect itself. Then use a slotted spoon or (my favorite) a Chinese spider to remove all the solid contents from the pot. Pour the stock through a fine sieve to remove all the remaining particles. Clean out the cookpot and return the stock to it. Refrigerate overnight. The following day, the fat will have risen to the top of the stock and congealed. You can easily remove it with a spoon and save it for future use (frying potatoes, perhaps?).


The stock is ready to use, or--more likely--divide into containers for the freezer.

Where Turkeys Come From

Hard as it may be for some consumers to believe, that turkey on the Thanksgiving table once was a living, breathing animal. Most turkeys for public consumption are raised in huge confinement lots, where they live a pretty miserable existence, all jammed together waiting for their date with the executioner. But at Mike Klein's farm in Brandywine, MD, about 35 miles outside the District of Coumbia in Prince George's County, a small flock lives on pasture. Their collapsible pen is moved from place to place so the turkeys can live outdoors and have fresh vegetagation and bugs to peck at.

Mike and his wife Michelle run a CSA subscription off their small truck patch, including lots of different vegetables, laying hens, roasters and turkeys for Thanksgiving. Mike's flock was smaller than usual this year, only around 25 birds. But it's still tough work. They eat their way through 100 pounds of feed each day and they are always in danger of escaping their pen and being eaten by the local foxes.

Finally it comes time to slaughter the turkeys and The Slow Cook lends a hand. This year it was a glorious day, sunny and calm, the farm surrounded by oak and hickory trees in a blaze of fall colors. It was a bit warmer than Mike and Michelle would like. But it felt great to the rest of the volunteer crew. Here is a gallery of photos showing the turkey butchering operation. If the sight of dead animals makes you queasy, this would be a good time to avert your eyes.

The breed of turkey Mike raised this year is a double-breasted bronze. The first task is to capture the birds, which dart around the pen to avoid us and sometimes find their way over the top of the electrified fencing and have to be chased back inside. We try to grab a bird by its leg, avoiding the flapping wings. The turkeys don't fly much, but their powerful wings can leave a nasty bruise or a bloody nose if you aren't careful. We hogtie the birds and cart them six-at-a-time back to the open-air slaughtering area.

The turkeys are treated gently while they wait their turn to be killed. We lift them out of the cart and hang them from hooks on a steel A-frame, so their heads are just a few inches above the ground. They hang very calmly and quietly. We say a few words to a turkey as we take its head in the left hand, then slit the jugular vein with a quick motion of a sharp knife.

So far, there has been hardly a word of protest from the turkeys. Even after their throats are cut, they dangle calmly from the A-frame. Then, as the last of the blood drains out of them and they lose consciousness, the birds flap their wings as if trying to escape. Apparently this is an involuntary reaction of the turkey brain as it thirsts for blood and oxygen. Perhaps animal rights groups would disapprove, but the turkeys have to die so we can eat, and to me, this method of killing seems extremely humane. Except for a few seconds of flapping wings, the whole process is reverential and calm, to the point of serene.




Mike lifts the turkey carcasses off their hooks and lowers them by the feet into a tub of scalding water, around 160 degrees. A minute or so is all it takes to loosen the feathers for plucking. Too long and the skin is damages.



Mike uses a machine to remove most of the feathers. It's a drum studded with long rubber nubs that look like knobby fingers. The drum spins at a rapid rate. You push the bird into the spinning nubs--they grab the feathers and pull them off. But hang on tight to that bird, or it will be sucked into the machine.


The bird then goes to a tub of cold water where a volunteer plucks the remaining feather and gets it ready for butchering.






The turkey is very dead and very naked at this point. We lift it out of the water and lay it on the butchering table where I remove the feet at the knees (the feet will be boiled for stock), then cut off the head. Working a boning knife through the skin I expose the neck and cut it off at the base with a pair of shears. My job is to then reach into the exposed neck cavity and remove the crop, the trachae and the esophagus.



Working at the other end of the bird are Michelle and daughter Sylvia. Michelle carefully carves around the bird's anus to reveal the intestinal tract without spilling any of its contents. The carcass must not be contaminated at this point. She reaches inside to remove all of the organs and viscera. Sylvia harvests the liver, heart, kidneys and gizzards, all to be iced and packed with the birds later.


The organs come out of the turkey carcass glistening and pristine. I cannot help marveling at how perfect in form they are, identical from one bird to the next--a miracle of creation. Michelle says she has no problem spending her day pulling the guts out of turkeys. It's the turkeys' feet she can't stand.


The gutted carcasses are cleaned in two changes of water before being chilled in an ice bath. After a quick lunch of grilled sausages, we turn our attention to the gizzards. Turkeys don't have teeth. They chew their food in an internal organ--the gizzard--where grains and food pellets are ground up by the pepples and stones the turkeys pick up in their foraging. If you've ever wondered what birds are pecking around for at the side of the road, it's little stones to fill their gizzards. We slice the gizzard in half. Inside is the pouch where the stones and food contents are located. It has to be peeled away from the meat--tough and painstaking work, like peeling the inside of a baseball mitt.

When the turkeys are good and cold, we bag them and weigh them. Mike charges $3 a pound. Some customers pick up their turkeys at the farm, the rest Mike delivers individually to clients in the Washington area the following day. Here's ours, all 31 pounds. We'll keep it in a cooler with plenty of ice until Thursday.