Something Shiny!

For many years now, we’ve eschewed the traditional Butterball turkey in favor of a more natural Thanksgiving. Usually this has meant ordering an organic turkey from afar and picking it up locally. This year, though, we acted early. At the beginning of the summer, I contacted a local farm and put my name on the list for a local, organic, free-range, non-scary turkey. They emailed last weekend and told me the turkey would be available to pick up on Wednesday. I’ll confess, I was a little worried: picking up a turkey the day before Thanksgiving usually spells disaster because the turkey won’t have had time to defrost properly. But we’d gotten this far and we were determined to see it through. If all else failed, we reasoned, we could always cook something else. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. We drove down to the farm on Wednesday in a rainstorm of biblical proportions. Lee Windham, of Four Arrows Ranch, welcomed us into her house and pulled a fresh (not frozen) turkey out of her fridge. It had been slaughtered and cleaned just a couple days prior. She apologized for the weight; heritage turkeys tend to be a bit smaller than the broad-breasted freaks turkeys that Americans have come to expect. But people, that was the best turkey I’ve ever tasted. Flavorful, plump and juicy, we didn’t care that he was a little smaller than his mass-produced brethren. He was just perfect. And for that, we were truly thankful.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Gainesville, Green, NaBloPoMo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.