So we won’t get all depressed on a holiday (or at least I won’t) because of the war, let us ponder the world’s largest turkey ever recorded:
On December 12, 1989, the biggest turkey ever recorded weighed 86 pounds at a competition this stag turkey won in London. Its weight was equivalent to a baby rhino. The turkey named Tyson belonged to Leacroft Turkeys Ltd. It was eventually sold for $6,692 at a charity auction.
That is FOUR TIMES LARGER than the average turkey. Now I can’t be sure that that picture is of Tyson, but he also weighed as much as a baby cow. I can’t find genuine video or photos of Tyson, but I hope he wasn’t eaten, but nobody seems to know his fate. If you’re noodling around on the Internet today, try to find a photo or a video of Tyson, or at least tell us what happened to him!
From The Daily Meal:
In 2014, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals told Mother Jones that the average turkey clocked in around 13 pounds in the 1930s and that turkey farms now raise birds that are more than double that size. The outlet adds that larger birds also tend to be more susceptible to illness, which might explain the current Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza going around on U.S. turkey farms.
Oh, and tell us what you’re eating for Thanksgiving. For me it’s fettuccine Alfredo with a terrific bottle of New Zealand Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.
I hope you have a relaxing Thanksgiving, Jerry. Enjoy that good NZ wine. All the best
French onion soup and apple pie!
Happy Thanksgiving to all! 🙂
We are having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with two turkeys! A regular one tonight, with mashed potatoes, gravy, chestnut stuffing, Brussel sprouts, homemade apple pie. And tomorrow we break out a Greenberg smoked turkey from Texas. That is a real treat!
An omelet and British boiled potatoes. We know how to live. Happy Thanksgiving folks.
Love love love hearing about your treat for the Holiday!
We wish you the best, for a safe holiday season!
Sam Greenberg
Happy holidaze to our host and to all other readers. For me and a developmentally disabled son, the holiday season always begins in late October with visits to Home Depot to admire their animatronic robot goblins, ghouls, ghosts, and witches. My
multicultural Thanksgiving dinner tonight will be Chinese roast duck, store-bought stuffing, and a salad of corn, beans, onions, peppers, and cucumbers.
Cornish hens and roast vegetables with red wine or Brooklyn chocolate stout. Home baked italian bread.Desert is decaf with biscotti or cheesecake.
That’s a big turkey. It would require a very big oven and would be difficult to cook evenly. But then again, I suppose that this turkey wasn’t meant for the table.
Our dinner for just the two of us, being lovingly prepared by my wife: Roast turkey marsala, roasted butternut squash with herbs de Provence, roasted Brussels sprouts with turkey bacon (Yum!), mashed potatoes and gravy, marinated beets with feta cheese over Romaine lettuce, and pumpkin pie for dessert.
I will only eat a little bit of each, saving the rest for several days of leftovers.
I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!
My boys (13 year old tuxedo cat and 6-ish jet black floofy former feral) will be enjoying a little bit of roast turkey courtesy of a neighbor, while I have had a jambalaya going for several days in the slow cooker, mostly local grown, with shallots, leek, andouille (from NOLA), poblano peppers, heirloom tomatos (various types), celery, and some crawdad I had in the freezer from the summer (caught in a local lake, so not quite to type for jambalaya, given that I am in NJ. I can’t tell which of the several local species). Put in wild rice, a little tobasco, and bone stock broth that I keep on hand. It should be done in another hour, as should the sweet potato (sorry, this is the USA so “yam”) that is on the grill for a traditional touch.
Capped with the final River Horse Pumpkin of the year (8.1%, NOT ‘pumpkin spice’, but actual pumpkin. Excellent as a marinade for potato dishes, as well as smooth sipping beer), and a Churu squeeze treat for the boys.
Apparently factory turkey farms are brutal, unfortunately, but I won’t go into detail since this is supposed to be a relaxing thread. I don’t care for them tastewise, they’re the blandest of birds, and the 86-pounder probably would taste terrible. The most savory poultry in my opinion are cornish hens.
However tonight we will be having shrimp, wild caught. Last night we had chicken from Sprouts, which is excellent, the best of the supermarket cooked birds.
Turkey, stuffing, corn, peas, yams, cranberry sauce, cider and pumpkin loaf for dessert. It ain’t fancy but it suits us.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
A can of beans will be my fare.
That’s what I’m leaning to too with toast. But it’s not Thanksgiving here.
Turkey, stuffing, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and lots of wine. Getting to desert right now.
We don’t do Thanksgiving in the UK, but best wishes to everyone who does. We had pasta with a seafood sauce, accompanied by a bottle of NZ Marlborough SB, like our host! My son-in-law’s family grow a lot of SB grapes in Marlborough, so it’s entirely possible that PCC(E) and I have shared a few drops of grape extract today. Cheers!
PS: congrats to the administrators for allowing posts to appear instantaneously, and for reintroducing the edit function and the name-saving function.
All from scratch – glad to give tips:
Guacamole
Salsa verde
Salsa rojo (red)
Queso blanco
Bread
That’s my contribution – shared w/ others.
Cheers
Happy thanksgiving Prof JC and everyone.
Glad to hear you’re enjoying some of our nice NZ wine 🤩
If you are not familiar with Dog Point wines, which is in the Marlborough district, I recommend them highly. Both their Pinot and Sauvignon Blanc are consistently good.
Like the UK, we don’t do Thanksgiving in NZ, but great to hear you (and Steve!) are enjoying the fermented result of careful viniculture – probably produced quite locally to me too here in Nelson, NZ!
Still, our turkey is on order for Christmas Day, and the Savvy Blanc from last year’s harvest arrived this morning – and the grapes are starting to form for 2024’s vintage.
Who are these people who call it stuffing? We had a roasted hen, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, cranberry relish, corn soufflé, fruit salad, seared green beans, sweet potato puree in orange shells with yes, tiny marshmallows on top, and two kinds of pie, cranberry apple and pecan. Pretty traditional southern Thanksgiving food, except for the substitution of the chicken for turkey.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Our first with a grandson. That’s worth being grateful.
I’m in the UK, but married to an ex-pat American, and in recent years we’ve taken to making a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. With Christmas approaching, all the major supermarkets are selling frozen turkey “crowns”, which are the breast (white) meat only. The small ones have enough meat on them for six people, or three meals worth for two people.
I served sweet potatoes (yams), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, stuffing (dressing) and cranberry sauce with the bird, which was juicy and succulent. Also strips of streaky bacon, which I draped over the bird for the last half hour of cooking. My family used to do this with the Christmas turkey when I was a kid, and we both love bacon (“the candy of meats”) so it seemed like a good idea.
We both ate hearty, but not to the point of catatonia, and there’s plenty of leftover turkey. I expect that my Beloved will snack on some of it, and the remainder will be the guest of honour at the weekend when I’ll cook more sweet potatoes and broccoli for her, and make a turkey rogan josh for myself. Gobble gobble gobble!
Best wishes to those USA Thanksgiving celebrators.
No thanksgiving here, however supper, slow cooker overnight root vegetable stew with lentils, barley, various beans and dumplings made from shredded vegetable suet.
Wine, Australian Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz.
Dessert, Golden Syrup Pudding steamed and served with non dairy cream.
Of note. There is still in many areas of the UK a form of Thanksgiving, locally to villages and towns. This is “The Harvest Festival” a form of thanksgiving for the successful harvest and is held end September and or October depending on the harvest type. Often held in the Parish Church or Community Hall where examples of the harvest and other foodstuffs etc would be donated and later given to worthy causes. It survives, just but the religious element has declined in pace with the decline of congregations.