But behind the scenes is the untold story, of the turkey that wasn't.
You see a few months ago, my beloved husband killed his first wild turkey, we were so excited, his cousin showed him how to pull the skin off the turkey, and he cleaned it, packed it in a plastic bag and brought it home. I took it out of the bag, washed it real good and put it in the freezer.
Now our plan for Thanksgiving was to serve two turkeys, one nice fat store bought butterball, done the traditional way, soaked in brine for 24 hours and baked in the oven, and the wild turkey, it being smaller I searched the internet for methods of preparing it, and found a wonderful crockpot recipe which we decided to try.
So on Thanksgiving morning, I took the defrosted wild turkey from the bag, rinsed it off good and placed it breast down in the crock pot. I added cream of mushroom soup, a packet of dry onion soup mix, some water, some fresh mushrooms and baby carrots and half a white onion.......and turned it on low for the day......boy did it smell good!
Later on that day, as my husband was carving up the Butterball, (that is his job) and family had all gathered and brought in their various dishes to add to the feast, I decided to assist my husband and get started on carving up the wild turkey. I had a nice dish to lay it out on, and my plan was to slice it up nice and serve it with the mushrooms and carrots and gravy poured over it in the dish.
So I removed it from the pot and began carving. Beautiful slices of white meat, moist and delicious looking, and I arranged them nicely on the platter, as things begin to get a little more difficult to cut and as I got closer and closer to the bone, all of a sudden i cut into something black...........and to my horror (thankfully I did not scream or freak out) there were BUGS coming out of this turkey!
Keeping my calm, not wishing to alarm our guests nor gross anyone out, I quietly pulled my husband over to show him my findings. Well I guess turkeys have some kind of little compartment in their somewhere, where food goes when they first eat it, it’s not their stomach because my husband yanked all that stuff out when he cleaned it, and it’s a little pouch somewhere higher up in the throat or breast area. And this little turkey had been feasting on some big giant termites when he met his demise. And falling out of my beautiful wild turkey creation....were nicely sautéed termites...perhaps in some part of the world people would have rejoiced at this surprise, but not in this house.
So the wild turkey was quietly putaway, the meat I had cut from it placed in a bag, and the guests were simply told that the wild turkey would not be served, and that they really did not want to know why just yet.
So we ate, we feasted, we stuffed ourselves silly on turkey, yams, glazed honey carrots, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, asparagus, pork roast, cranberries, red chili, green chili, potato salad, green bean casserole, green chili meatballs, white dinner rolls, wheat dinner rolls, cherry pie and pumpkin pie..........and afterwards, we informed our guests of the problems encountered while carving up the wild turkey.
The canines rejoiced in our house Thanksgiving evening, for they feasted on the choice cuts of turkey, cuts normally denied them, they feasted and they feasted and they declared with happy faces and wagging tails and deep coma like sleep.....that it was good.
So should you have the good fortune to shoot yourself a nice plump wild turkey……look deep……look good…cause there just might be a little pouch of surprises in there.