Turkey

Of course turkey and Thanksgiving are a perfect pairing but this year we were determined to go local with our Thanksgiving dinner. Our summer garden triumphs put local food at the forefront of our eating habits and Thanksgiving was no reason to stray from this philosophy.

[Ok in fairness I have to admit that it was mainly my brother Andrew leading the local turkey charge. I thought it might be a bit of an expensive wild goose chase, if you'll pardon the pun.]

We grudgingly headed off to the Green Star Co-op in Ithaca– I say grudgingly because I was certain that we would be dropping a princely sum for this local turkey. Come to find out that Green Star was selling their supply of local turkeys at the wholesale price. We assumed that this was a good faith gesture intended to promote local farmers and the philosophy of eating locally produced food, especially meats. We were thrilled and acquired a 12-lb bird from a farm in nearby Interlaken, NY called Oink and Gobble Farms.

The local turkey tasted… great! Was is significantly different than an industrial farming food chain turkey? I hate to admit that I couldn’t taste a huge difference. But it was moist, delicious, reasonably priced and grew up just about 15 minutes down the road from the dinner table at which we were enjoying it!

The Garden News is very big, very exciting and hopefully very sunny. One of the (ahem, many) problems with the garden plots we chose last year for our first ever garden was the shadiness of the spot. It looked great in the late winter when the trees surrounding it had no leaves, but we quickly learned that it was awfully shady.

So our new spots include a couple of different areas right at the end of the property where it abuts the farmed acreage. We figure that it must be good soil being that close to the farmland and it is in a much (hopefully!) sunnier area. Of course the trees have no leaves now either, but with our skillful plotting of the sun’s trajectory we think we’ve avoided the major shade issues.

Oh, and the other news? More walnuts. Yup, being a glutton for punishment, I said yes when Dad offered to collect more walnuts on his clean-up of the roof and the grounds. We sat and removed the mostly rotten husks (an extraordinarily gross job) and then laid them out on a board in the basement in the manner we believe that Grandma would have done. We’ll see in the spring how this method compares to the oven-roasting method.

When I was high school student, I went to Queen of the Night  with my grandpararents and one of my relatives. Queen of the Night is a hotel in Nagano.  We went to this hotel by bus. It took 5 hours to get there.  I felt an air of mystery and good feeling when I was there. With its nice food, comfortable hot spring, I think this hotel is a great hotel to stay in on a vacation to Nagano.

At first,  Queen of the Night is in a beautiful, natural place. It was winter when I went to this hotel.  The hotel was in the mountains. Snow was on the trees. The view was very beautiful. I was so impressed and surprised.  In all 4 seasons, we can have a nice experience there. For example, in summer, this hotel does fireworks. At Christmas, the landlady plays the piano.

Next, this hotel serves delicious food. For example, this hotel serves liquor before eating dinner.  It is called an aperitif and drinking it gives you more appetite.  Horse sashimi is attractive.  Horse meat is tender and tasty. This hotel is in mountain, so they often serve local mountain food, for example, mushrooms, river fish, and mountain herbs and vegetables. the Mountain herbs change at each season.

Finally, there is the hot spring. I think it is very important point of  evaluation. I love hot springs.  the feeling of  entering them is impotant. However, the location is more impotant than the feeling. My favorite temperature of the bath is a little hot. This hot spring’s location is  grand because this hot spring is built at high position. If you go to an outdoor hot spring,  go in the winter so you can see a very beautiful winter atmosphere.  

At last, if you go to Nagano, go to this hotel, so you can have a nice feeling. You will leave with an great impression from the outdoor hot spring in winter and the excellent service of Queen of the Night.

by Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver; read by the author(s)

Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors; I have read and loved most of her previous books, notably The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams, and The Poisonwood Bible.  I remember enjoying her first collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson.  She writes wonderfully, so reading her is always a pleasure.

This, her newest book, is about her family’s year of “eating locally.”  Soon after moving from Tucson to a small mountain farm in southwestern Virginia, theKingsolver-Hopp family put into action the plan they had been hatching for about seven years: that of eating only what they grew themselves or bought from farmers in their region or state.  They planted a large vegetable garden and ordered chicks and turkey poults; the farm already had some fruit trees.  The book follows their odyssey for a full year, beginning with asparagus, the first spring vegetable, and continuing through greens, tomatoes, infinite amounts of zucchini, turkey “harvest”, and tubers, followed by frozen and canned foods purchased and harvested throughout the growing season, which sustained the family through the winter.  Barbara’s chronological narrative alternates with shorter sections by Stephen (on the science and politics behind the local food movement) and Camille (on nutritional aspects of local vs. ag-industry food).  The youngest member of the family, Lily, did not participate in the writing, but she plays an important role in the book as the family’s egg maven (a born entrepreneur, she started her egg business at the age of 6 with mail-order chicks).

The book meshed very well with other books I have read recently, in particular The Ravaging Tide, because the fossil fuels used to transport mass-produced food long distances  is implicated in global warming, and My Year of Meats, because long before they committed themselves to local food, the Kingsolver-Hopp family gave up eating feedlot beef and other products made from or by animals living in close confinement and denied any sort of normal existence (hogs, chickens, dairy cows…).  Before they began to eat local, that had meant vegetarianism, but they resumed eating meat,  poultry and eggs and consuming dairy products when they were sure that the animals had lived a more natural life and had been slaughtered humanely.  As an ethical vegetarian myself, I found Kingsolver’s chapter on the pros and cons of vegetarianism very enlightening.  It doesn’t make me want to eat meat again, but it makes sense.

My favorite chapter, the one that had me laughing out loud, was the one near the end of the book about turkey sex.  It seems that domestic turkeys, having been artificially bred and incubated for many generations, have kind of lost the knack for natural reproduction. How Barbara managed to learn about the lost art of turkey breeding and then persuade her turkeys to mate had me in stitches.  I also enjoyed Kingsolver’s descriptions of her and Stephen’s trip to Italy, where they ate their way through Tuscany, but in fact, I loved the whole book.  It definitely inspired me to try to eat more locally grown foods, something I had actually never really considered as important before I read it.

More information and recipes can be found at http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/.

The three co-authors narrated their own contributions to the book.