'Twas the Eve of Thanksgiving...

And in this house, the turkey is roasting!

My lovely friends of LTD Farm once again outdid themselves raising a fine flock of turkeys, and I was lucky enough to get a fairly giant one for myself.  This fifteen-pound beauty will not only provide me with acres of roast turkey and broth for days to come, but it's also traveling with me to my lovely friends Nicole & Tony's house tomorrow to be an addition to the holiday meal.

Oh, turkey.  How I love thee.  As long as you aren't a sad, mass produced thing that never saw the Great Outdoors, that is.  I only eat turkey once a year, and only a turkey that was grown and raised by my friendly neighborhood farmers.  I figure its worth the average $60 price tag to get a high quality creature on my table, one that had a whole summer to frolic in the sunshine and weedy pastures.

To that end, my deluxe bird gets the Royal Treatment: an all-over, under-skin massage with a mixture of softened organic butter, homemade apple butter, and cranberry mustard, followed by an on-the-skin massage of a secret mixture of herbs and spices in a vehicle of melted butter.  Then, the thoroughly relaxed bird is stuffed with herbs, sliced lemon, and garlic cloves, stoppered in with a giant apple.  Gently placed in a roasting pan, the bird is left to slow roast at 300 degrees all day, in a simmering lake of chicken broth and apple cider--basted every thirty minutes until the meat literally falls off the bone.  (I usually remove the legs when they are done a bit earlier than the breast, so the meat stays on the leg--the cavemen eaters really like to gnaw away at them.)

Oh, turkey.  If you must die to become my dinner, I hope your spirit is happy with the treatment you are getting today.  If karma comes back around and I, too, live a life of a pastured turkey, I hope someone gives me the same treatment at the end of my feathered days.